With as little review of the afternoon’s message as possible, I want to go right on this evening from where we left off then.
Just reminding you that what is before us, inclusively, is that with God everything is governed by one definite and clearly revealed purpose. That purpose is the whole mark of the Holy Spirit.
Wherever in the Word of God we come upon the Holy Spirit, from the very first reference in the first words of the Bible to the last in the Book of Revelation—in the one case, the Spirit of God brooding upon the face of the deep; in the other and final case, “the Spirit and the bride say, Come”—from first to last, all the way through, whenever we come upon the Holy Spirit, we come upon definiteness of purpose. We come upon the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of purpose.
Not just an influence in general, an abstract thing somewhere in the air. No, nothing like this, but a positive, definite registering of purpose. It is with that word and its meaning, that great spiritual thing, that we are being engaged at this time.
We go back again to the prophet Ezekiel, who is the interpreter of so much for us in the Old Testament. We find that this man, in a peculiar way, is the man of the Spirit.
If you have not done so, you can go through the book of his prophecies and just underline the word “Spirit.” It will be a revelation to you how full the book is of the movements, the activities, and the energies of the Spirit. In various ways, by different means, there is the Spirit.
The prophet himself was a man of the Spirit. How often, in recording his experience, did he say, “And the Spirit took me up, led me out, brought me in, took me round, showed me.” The man himself is truly under the government of the Spirit.
There are two things to say about that. May I interject: we must not look upon this just as Old Testament story or record. It is tremendously up to date—vitally up to date—for ourselves.
Firstly, then, we notice that, in order that the Spirit should reach His end and fulfil His divine purpose through a vessel, that vessel must be an absolutely committed vessel: committed, surrendered, abandoned.
When we say that, the idea may catch on with us. We may agree. We might even desire it to be so in our case. But I say to you, my dear friends, there is nothing more searching, more trying, and more exacting than this matter of being committed to the Holy Spirit.
You look at Ezekiel’s life and see what it meant to be committed to the Spirit. We shall see much of it, if the Lord continues to lead us this way. But, just to remind you, Ezekiel, by being committed to the Spirit, had to do a great many things against which the flesh completely revolts. The natural man shrinks from doing them.
You are not going to make a fool of yourself if you can help it, and he was called upon to do that. People laughed at him: “What is he doing?” They jeered and sneered. He was doing such ridiculous things from the standpoint of this world’s common sense. But he had to do them.
Enough for the moment. But it is all very well to say, “I am surrendered. I want to be surrendered. I am going to be a surrendered man, a surrendered woman. I surrender myself wholly.”
Well, let us be quite frank and faithful about this: if you are, the whole thing is going to be taken out of your hands. You are going where you would never go naturally. You are going by ways that you would never choose, from which you would turn back or away with all the shrinking of your natural life.
There are other aspects, of course—perhaps happier and better—but perhaps not. Now, Ezekiel was a committed man, not in words alone, but day by day, day by day, faced with some fresh challenge of the Spirit.
Having laid upon him some fresh demand contrary to nature, his committal found him ready—so ready that the Spirit could just do as He liked with him. So is He likely to do with us.
I say, that is searching. That will find us out. But the realization of the full divine purpose demands that there are men and women, and companies of men and women, who are committed in that way for the Holy Spirit.
You may have a battle over some things, but you will fight it through. You will fight it through. Face it; realize what it implies, what it means. You may shrink, and you may hesitate. You may feel you cannot, but you will fight it through. At least you will not surrender on the spot, but face this thing and get through with it, however long it takes.
Committed: our minds committed, our wills committed, our hearts committed, our bodies committed—everything committed.
In Ezekiel’s case, it came to his wife. He had to allow God to have His way, even in taking his wife. Well, you see how he behaved. He was a committed man. That is the point.
We are talking about God’s great purpose, everything being governed by purpose. The Spirit is the custodian of the eternal purpose; the Spirit has this in charge. But He must have vessels that are committed in this way.
There are, of course, counterparts in the New Testament. The Book of Acts is, in one sense, the counterpart of the prophecies of Ezekiel. Here you have the Spirit, undoubtedly like the fiery chariot of God in Ezekiel—the wheels and the living ones.
“Whithersoever the Spirit was to go, they went,” it says. That is undoubtedly the New Testament counterpart of Ezekiel in that sense.
Here you sometimes come up against a hitch, even in an apostle. He is challenged about something that naturally and religiously, and as he thought scripturally, he would never do.
Peter had the Scripture on his side when he said, “No unclean thing hath ever passed my lips.” “Not so, Lord. I have Scripture for my position.” The eleventh chapter of Leviticus apparently supported him in that position.
The Spirit thought otherwise. The Cross had come in between Leviticus and Peter’s time and dealt with all unclean things, so that the Spirit could say, “What God hath cleansed, make not thou common.” Peter had to adjust, but there was a battle. There was a hitch. The Spirit came up against something in the flesh.
It was a very desperate situation. His apostleship was at stake. The purpose of God through such a man was within the balances of that: “Peter, are you going to be committed to the Spirit and let the Spirit have His way, or are you going to stand on your traditional ground, your mental ground?”
Well then, thank God, Peter got through that battle and proved his committal, and the Spirit went on. I just put that in as an illustration of what I mean. Look at Acts: it is like that. The Spirit has got the purpose in hand, but He must have committed instruments.
I said there were two things. That is one. We can enlarge much upon that, but what we have to say later is about the breaking out of that. Another thing is this: do, dear friends, adjust your minds to this fact, that God raises up instruments and vessels in relation to His full purpose.
Those instruments and vessels are not something in themselves, and their ministry is not just bound up with them.
Ezekiel’s location, God’s choice of him, God’s raising him up, God’s use of him, and his committal to the Spirit were related to a people—related to a people. It was not his private ministry, his private anointing.
The people were going to be held responsible for that ministry. That ministry, if it was going to be justified and vindicated, would be found in a people.
You must not say, “Oh, that is so-and-so’s ministry,” or, “That is the ministry they give at such-and-such a place. That is a line of teaching,” or, “That is this particular emphasis.” Beware. Beware.
They could have said that, if you think: “See, that is Ezekiel’s ministry. He is quite at liberty to fulfil it and carry it out. Let him do it. When he has done it, well, we will remain by someone else, or others.” And that is it—they would write it off.
Anything that God has given of light, or ministry that has been under the Holy Spirit, is not for a time; it is for eternity. It is not private. It is for the people of God.
The people of God who come to the knowledge of it are going to be held responsible for it. Just dare not write it off like that: “Well, that is just their person, their line of teaching.”
Rather say, for example, “Has God given that? Are there any marks or evidences of the anointing in that? Is the Lord with that?” If so, for all time and eternity, you are responsible for it. It is in a people that it is to be found.
They may refuse. They may forbear, and it may not be found to work out. All right, then what happens? What happened in the case of Ezekiel would be repeated. In one of his visions of God, he saw the glory being lifted away from Jerusalem in stages, far away.
That is a terrible thing: the glory departing, the glory departing.
Well, that is the general situation. I said this afternoon, “I have a burden, and I must get my burden off.” Forgive me if I seem to be too emphatic, but it is very necessary, dear friends, for us to seriously face this thing. God help us.
If we are not in line with and in sympathy with the Holy Spirit, there is no help for us and no hope for us. The great need of our time is for the people of God to be caught up again in a mighty, energetic movement of the Spirit of God.
Yes, but the Spirit has His ways and He has His grounds. Well now, I have stated that in this inclusive way. Here we are confronted with this: on the one side, the Spirit is the Spirit of a purpose; on the other side, the Spirit must have a committed vessel, or committed vessels.
I might add to that: it is not always individual. God has many times raised up a little company of people in which He has deposited His treasure, and made it the example for others.
I say that because some of you may say, “Well, we are not all Ezekiels. We cannot all be Ezekiels.” I repeat, this is a relative or corporate matter. This is not a personal thing at all.
So we come face to face with the major factor and distinctive feature of the purpose of God: the energy of the Holy Spirit. The Book of Ezekiel, like the Book of Acts, is the book of the goings of the Spirit—the Spirit moving in purpose.
Now we want to get inside that, get right inside there, and know what we shall find if we are really under this mighty impulse of the Spirit of God, as we should be, as we may be, as indeed we are under obligation to be.
When we say Ezekiel was a man of the Spirit, how was he a man of the Spirit? What was it that marked him as the man of the Spirit? When we say that the Book of Acts is the book of the mighty, energetic goings of the Spirit, what do we mean? What do we find there?
Oh, dear friends, bear with me as I urge upon you with all my heart to be quite sure on this matter, quite clear.
We can use all the language, have all the phrases, and speak about vision. We can protest that we have seen all that and have not lost the vision. Some way or other like that, we can talk.
But what I want to so strongly emphasize here is this: whether we have or have not lost vision and purpose can never be proved by our teaching, and can never be proved by our order of service, by our form of worship.
Some of you are frowning. “What do you mean by that?” I say again, you can have all the truth and all the teaching, all the language, and you can have the most exact order of things in your meetings. You can have a perfect New Testament form of it and have lost the vision and the purpose.
There was the cry of Isaiah:
Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and declare unto My people their transgression.
Yet they seek Me daily, and delight to know My ways.
How do you reconcile it? “My people, their transgression”; yet “they delight to know My ways” and “seek Me daily.” In other words, they protest that everything is all right. They would say, “We have not lost the vision.”
They have got it all on the outside. You know how much there is in the prophets about this: continuing the ritual, the offering of the sacrifices, going through the routine of the temple—it is all there. And yet Ichabod is written over the whole: the glory has departed.
No, I repeat, we cannot prove it by our words. We cannot prove it by our forms. That is not it. That is not it.
That does not mean that teaching does not matter, or that our procedure is of no account. That is not the point. We can have all that; still, we have not got the proof. The proof comes by the characteristics.
Stand back then from all the teaching; stand back from all the careful order and procedure; and ask questions about these things that we are going to mention. Look, check me up by the Scriptures. See if this is not true.
The evidence, the proof, that the Spirit was really in charge and on the move in the first place—the evidence in those concerned, be it Ezekiel, or a company, or the church in the Book of Acts—was found in this: a dynamic incentive which had captivated the people with one mighty object.
A people of tremendous incentive. Ezekiel was a man of incentive.
Notice how his prophecies begin: “The word of the Lord came expressly unto Ezekiel.” Right there at the beginning, the note of the whole book is struck.
How do you meet and feel and sense all the way through? The element of precision, the element of urgency. You find it in a hundred different ways. Why, he dates everything: this happened on that specific day, in that specific month, in that specific year. “I tell you the very day when it happened.”
That is precision. That is definiteness. There is nothing general about that, nothing vague about that. His places tell you exactly where it happened, right to detail in his temporal presentation.
Every point is marked. I am just giving you a general picture of things, but he gives you every action marked. This book is a book of expressness, if I may put it like that. The word came to Ezekiel expressly.
Here is a man who is on that line; he is like that. Precision. Oh, are you a person like that? Am I a person like that? Are you a company of people like that?
Whenever you meet as a company, do you get the atmosphere of a company of people who are gathered up—really gathered up and captivated—by an objective toward which they are moving without any reservation? People with an incentive.
That is the proof that you have got the vision I am talking about. That is the proof that you have got the purpose; you are in the purpose I am talking about. That is the proof that you understand the teaching: it has caught you, it has gripped you, it lays hold of you.
To use J. H. Jowett’s phrase, “It is a fire in your bones.”
Maybe these prophets were very discouraged, sometimes brought almost to a standstill in their difficulty and perplexity. I tell you, to be a man or child of God with a distinctive ministry is a terrible thing to say. Go through what they went through; you understand times like that.
But the fact is, they went on and fulfilled their ministry, not because of their own resolution. This fire was in their bones—a mighty incentive.
The prophet said, “I said, I will no more speak.” But when he kept silent, what happened? Well, the fire burned, and he had to speak again.
It may be spread over a long history. You may go down in discouragement and perplexity, even in broken-heartedness, feeling that things are such that you cannot go on any longer. But somehow or other—yes, we know how—the Spirit is in charge. He has got a grip upon your life. On you go again.
If that were not true, you can take it that the one who is talking to you would not be on this platform today. It is like that. That is the proof that you have got vision, that you are in the purpose.
The Spirit is the energetic, dynamic incentive of purpose.
Running parallel with that, there is this characteristic of the impact of purpose. Not only its energy and its dynamic incentive, but it registers. Those people know what they are after. That man knows where he is going.
There is nothing tentative about them, nothing indecisive, nothing indefinite. These people, that person, are not beating the air. He or she is not beating the air.
There is this registering of an impact of purpose. So it was, perhaps pre-eminently, with the apostle Paul: “This one thing I do. This one thing I do.”
Now, dear friends, what is our single, inclusive purpose in being? Have you got one? Have you become mastered by a single purpose in life?
A purpose that you bring into your business, into your profession, into your home, into wherever you are. Whatever people may have to say about you—and they can level many criticisms at you, and perhaps rightly so on many points, and have some discouraging things to say—they have to come back to this: that person has a great incentive for God. They are bent upon the interests of the Lord, and there is no doubt about it.
That is a characteristic of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is never distracted, never indefinite, never passive. The Holy Spirit is never indecisive.
Meet Him anywhere, and you meet One who is set and deliberate, who carries always with Him this: “I am on business. Come with Me; go with Me. Or, if you will not, I will not tarry. I am going on. I am going on.”
Oh, thank God for the Holy Spirit, One who goes on. You find Him going on. You may stop, or you may take a detour. You come back to the Lord, and you still find that He is going on.
I am very glad, you know, that in the midst of all our difficulties and troubles, we find the Lord going on. The Lord is going on. Oh, let us catch on with the Lord.
May I tarry, by the way: have we this deep sense of being apprehended, gripped, and mastered by a single purpose which runs through every aspect of our life? Do we have any aspect of life apart from this one object for which we have been apprehended by Christ Jesus?
May I say again, this is not always only individuals. The Lord has called His church to be like this. If He cannot get the whole, He will get part of it like this. Link with something that is like this, or ask the Lord to bring you into something like this, because the end, as we said this afternoon, has got to be fully corporate and collective.
Well, let us go on. Another characteristic: the Spirit, when He is really on the move and has His issue very much in mind—we have much more of the New Testament also in mind—you will notice that when the Spirit really gets hold and is in charge, there is created a growing intelligence in those concerned.
That is, an intelligence, a knowledge, that grows with the government of the Holy Spirit.
Thinking of Ezekiel, of course it is symbolic. There you have Ezekiel saying, “I saw. I saw. In the Spirit, I saw.” Then you remember that symbolic chariot of God, the cherubim, the wheels. “They were full of eyes, full of eyes.”
That is Old Testament symbolism, if you like. It is repeated in the Book of Revelation. But what does it mean from the New Testament standpoint, and therefore for us?
Paul is on his knees in His presence. He is on his knees, and he is praying for the saints—and that means you and me, the church for the whole dispensation. Although at the time he had the churches of his day almost in his mind, the Spirit made it more than that.
What is he praying?
That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him;
having the eyes of your heart enlightened, that ye may know what is the hope of His calling, what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what the exceeding greatness of His power.
A spirit of wisdom and revelation, opening the eyes of the heart—there it is: Spirit as the Spirit of spiritual intelligence.
Dear friends, I am certain most of you go with me when I say that perhaps one of the greatest needs amongst the Lord’s people today is spiritual understanding and intelligence.
Oh, the ignorance of these things. You can go about this so-called Christian country; you can find scattered over the length and breadth of this land—and it is true of other lands—halls and meeting places called chapels and churches, where Christians gather together. They hear the Bible read, they hear sermons, and they attend prayer meetings.
You begin to speak to them about the Lord, and they look at you as though you are a foreigner speaking a foreign language. “I do not know what you are talking about.” Now, that is not exaggeration. That is proven. Some of you know it is.
You cannot get beyond the most elementary things with a vast number of Christians who have been Christians for decades. They do not understand you.
No surprise, are you? There is confusion and weakness and lack of impact—lack of impact.
Believe me, dear friends, this impact, this registering of which we are speaking, coming from the Holy Spirit, will come through people who know the Lord, who know where they stand, and whose knowledge is increasing all the time.
Spiritual intelligence. Pray for it: “The eyes of your heart being enlightened.” This is not the alone prerogative of the prophet Ezekiel.
In this great letter from which we have just quoted, Paul is praying for this very thing for the saints. In that very letter he says to them all, “Be filled with the Spirit.”
What does he mean? A lot of effervescence, bubbling over, noise, emotion? Oh, be intelligent people! Just as much the Spirit of intelligence as He is the Spirit of energy and emotion.
That, then, is a test. Have we got the vision? Have we? Are we in the purpose?
One more thing for the moment. Notice: the movement of the Spirit in Ezekiel, and in Acts, and in Ephesians, is a Spirit of integration.
I take out of Ezekiel’s prophecies the well-known illustration of the valley full of dry bones. Examine them again. Do what Ezekiel did: pass to and fro through the valley. They are very many, very many, and very dry.
Although it does not say so specifically, it does say in effect that they are very scattered and unrelated, because when the Spirit moved, they came together. Here they are: so many, many unrelated bones—detached bones, dry, unnourished, dead, scattered bones.
What a picture. How true—too much. Do you know that state: disintegrated, separated, divided, existing apart?
Now the Spirit—“Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” As I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to its bone.
They were all articulated and integrated, clothed upon with flesh, filled with life and filled with power: a mighty army.
Now, my point in all this is just this: when the Spirit moves, He integrates. He gets over the dividedness. He gets over the separation. He gets over the isolation. He gets over the individualism.
He is the Spirit of integration.
It is perfectly clear that the state of things in Ezekiel was not God’s mind for His people, because when the Spirit moves, He shows what God’s mind really is.
We get the Book of Acts and you find it like that. There is integration right from the beginning of the Spirit’s movement.
The apostle, in the letter to the Ephesians, is concerned that the Spirit shall be able to do this very work. He sees this: that an army is needed—the church in the form of an army—because we wrestle with principalities and powers, with the world rulers of this darkness, and with wicked spirits. In fact, you are in a battle.
The church must be on its feet, integrated to meet this. God knows very well that the enemy can have it all his own way if, in the first place, he can get in between the Lord’s people and divide them. Then he can drive the wedge more and more deeply in, to put them further and farther apart. That is his day. The church is out of the fight.
So the apostle, in this very letter, true to the background and true to the whole theme, says, “And grieve not the Holy Spirit.”
I must leave you, dear friends, to apply that and work that out, as I do myself. I must leave it with you: find out whether your way is a way that grieves the Holy Spirit, personally or collectively. Is the Spirit grieved?
If the Spirit is grieved, we are disintegrated, and we are out of the fight. We cannot stand up to the enemy. Where there is disintegration, he is having it all his own way.
But if the Spirit is grieved, we do fall apart. We do. For any reason whatever that the Spirit is grieved, we fall apart; and the Spirit is grieved when we are fallen apart.
Make no mistake about this. It is a terrible thing to have to live and go on with a grieved Holy Spirit. It really takes all the heart out of it, saps all the vitality, drains all the light, and makes the going very hard when the Spirit is grieved.
Oh, we must attend to this, see where it is, and labour at it. So the apostle says, not only, “Grieve not the Holy Spirit,” but, “Give diligence. Make it your business to keep the unity of the Spirit.”
For very much larger reasons than just getting on nicely and happily together, having a pleasant time, there are all the issues of God’s eternal purpose bound up with this.
There are things for which you have been saved, chosen in Christ, called by His grace, kept by His power. It is a big thing that is in view. The whole thing is jeopardized when the Spirit is grieved and we are disintegrated.
Do not forget: the enemy sees the value and advantage of having a disintegrated state amongst the Lord’s people much more clearly than we do, and lays very much more value upon it and gives very much more importance to it than we do.
He knows that his kingdom will remain intact while the church is divided and disintegrated. He knows that his kingdom is menaced when the people of God are together in this integration of the Holy Spirit.
The Lord teach us. I think that is all I dare say, really. Perhaps you think it is enough. Well, it is enough to face; it is enough to work out.
May I come back? There is a lot more going to be said yet, the Lord willing, but I come back here. This is what I meant at the beginning when I said that the Lord must have committed people.
See what He means. Here it is. These are the issues. This is of tremendous importance.
Oh then, Lord, I commit myself to this in a new way. I commit myself.
Stand on the authority of the Lord Jesus Himself:
If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?
On that basis: “Father, Your Son has said, ‘How much more shall Your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit.’ I ask You.”
Do not let the Lord go over this tonight. Be committed. Let us all be committed in a new way to this mighty government and energy of the Holy Spirit in relation to the very purpose for which we are Christians in this place tonight.