We ask that they may come into this very time which we have together, a literal experience of what we have just said: sitting at Thy feet, Lord. Where else would we be? Where else would we listen?
Give to us that unspeakable privilege and blessed experience of hearing, through every other sound and voice, the voice of the Lord by the Holy Spirit in our hearts, for Jesus’ sake.
We are, this morning at least, dear friends, turning aside from the main theme of the conference, as I feel we are being led by the Lord, to something which, while not outside of that continuity, is nevertheless of very great importance to us.
I would ask your attention to the Letter to the Philippians, Philippians 4:1:
Wherefore, my brethren beloved and longed for, my joy and crown, so stand fast in the Lord, my beloved.
We, and the Church of God, have come to have a very great regard for the Apostle Paul. We have a very high esteem for that beloved servant of God. When we read his writings, we feel that we meet the Lord in them and in him. What he says is really an expression of the Lord; it represents the mind of the Lord.
In this letter to the Philippians, he speaks of the mind of the Lord: “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.” And he himself truly reflects the mind of Christ.
So, when we read words like these which we have just read, we feel that this is not only Paul’s estimate of these believers; it is the Lord’s mind about them: “My brethren, beloved, and longed for, my joy and crown, my beloved.” Not only Paul speaking; it is the Lord speaking.
What a wonderful thing—a wonderful thing—for the Lord to be able to speak like that about His people. Paul, so to speak—well, we would be happy people if someone of whom we had so great an esteem could say that to us, truly, honestly. But if the Lord could say it, our hearts would rejoice.
There is no mistaking the love of Paul for the churches—quite unmistakable in all his letters to them. They breathe the love of God, as well as speak of love for them.
That same love—wonderful love, marvellous love, unfeigned and unmistakable love—has a variety of expressions. It is an all-round love.
We reduce that word, that idea, so often to a single conception. We speak of love, and we have just one thought in our minds. But when we come to this love in the New Testament, we find that it is many-sided love, a love with many aspects.
Quite hurriedly and briefly, I want to point out to you some of these aspects of this same love. It is always the same, though it seems at times to change in its approach.
Take, for instance, in the first place, the letters to the Corinthians. There is no question whatever about Paul’s love for the Corinthian believers; let that be settled.
You only have to be reminded of how much, in those letters, that word is used, and how much outpouring of heart-love is found and expressed there. He cries, “Our heart is enlarged. Ye are not straitened in us.”
He makes many references to his love, and of course it is in the First Letter to the Corinthians that we have the matchless classic and song of love in chapter 13. I say that for the Corinthians there is no question or doubt whatever as to Paul’s love.
And yet, when that is said and recognised, you listen: you hear just as unmistakably a stern note in his voice. Maybe there are marks of sadness in his face; maybe the expression of an overflowing heart. But as he writes, there is a note that is unmistakable: it is the note of correction.
In this first letter particularly, love is unmistakable; yet love is correcting. It is correcting them.
And, dear friends, it is a poor love—a poor love—that never corrects. Indeed, it is not divine love at all; it is merely human sentimentality, sickly, supine, and weak. Anything that is called love but never corrects, that will not even take the rod of correction and use it—“Shall I come unto you with a rod?” asks the apostle of these people.
No, it is not kindness. It is never kindness just to give an anodyne for some malady without going right to the root of the malady to clear it up. Probably it is only going to be worse a little later on.
Just to smooth things over—to love, what you call love, make nothing of it, hide it, cover it, put the plaster on, and do that sort of thing—that is not love. That is not love.
Paul, whose love was genuine divine love, went right deep down, cut deep, probed to get right at the root of the malady, the trouble which was crushing and plaguing and working like a cancer amongst the saints in Corinth. Love—yes, divine love—has a corrective aspect.
And remember that it is just in the application of love in that way that our true Christian character, measure, and calibre will be found out.
I am so glad that the Corinthians survived this use of the rod. Oh, he did have to say to them that he had to speak to them as children, not as full-grown; but they seemed to grow up under the chastening very quickly. The Second Letter, you know, is a big change. They survived the correction of love and seemed to have grown tremendously, very quickly, between the two letters.
But it was a great test. You will read and see, discern as you read the first letter, Paul’s fears—fears that they would not survive the test. Because this kind of love always finds us out. It always finds us out.
You see, if we are going just to remain as little children and are corrected, you know what happens: little children become sulky if they are corrected. They become resentful if they are corrected. They carry a grievance with them if they are corrected. They will lie about like that if they are corrected. Spoiled children always do that.
I knew somebody who, even not in childhood but in youth, was so petted by his mother. She was always talking about him and what a wonderful fellow he was. Whenever you met her, the one subject was this son of hers. He came home in the evening—well, she just fussed him about and all that.
I have lived to know in afterlife how that man could never, never accept any correction. He had been brought up to believe that he was always right—always right. He was the one who could not be wrong. A dangerous thing.
That is not love, dear friends. That is not love.
Paul said to these, for instance, “Because I tell you the truth, am I become your enemy?” Have you made me your enemy? Do you regard me as your enemy because I have been faithful with you, frank with you, strict with you, true—but in love?
But it was true love. And I say again, the Second Letter shows not only the triumph of grace in them, but shows that it is a good thing—it is a good thing—for love to correct. A wonderful letter, the Second Letter is, and it is the fruit of faithful, faithful dealings, though they were stinging and hard to bear and testing, and perhaps even perilous if there was not the right reaction.
I will not stay further with that. I pass you on to the Letter to the Galatians. Here we find love—well, is it not?
There is plenty, plenty of love in the Letter to the Galatians. “My little children,” says the Apostle Paul, “of whom I am again in travail.” Is that love? Oh yes, there is love for the Galatians. The apostle undoubtedly loved the Galatian believers, the believers in Galatia.
But when we read this letter to the churches in Galatia, while we can discern that deep undertone of love, we find that love here is in a state of flaming jealousy and wrath.
No letter that ever Paul penned had so much in it like this anger, this wrath, this fiery, energetic language. Here it is almost terrible. It is love in jealous anger.
I say, is that love? Oh, let us again get corrected in our ideas now. You see, there is an idea that largeness of mind is love. Really, largeness of mind is often only another term for compromise and weakness in the presence of very dangerous error.
“Oh, let us be generous. Let us be large-minded.” All right, no one would hold a brief for being small-minded, but let us be careful of our terms.
Here is a situation where love cannot compromise, where love cannot be weak. Too much is at stake for even love to be suspended. But it is necessary for love to take on this aspect.
What is it? Well, you see, the whole point in Galatia was this point of compromise—compromise for something other and something less than the full revelation that had come through this apostle to these believers.
He had given them a wonderful unveiling of the Lord Jesus; there is no doubt about that. He could never have stood up to them as he did if they did not know. He could never have spoken like this if they were ignorant of the truth. They knew.
But they were in danger of letting go something of what the Lord had given and shown, compromising perhaps for popularity, for position, for what they would call influence, or standing well, or not having difficulties with others.
Wanting to be, and desiring to be, in the good books of everybody, and keeping in the middle of the road—safety. Call it by its true name: it is compromise.
And if ever there was a man on this earth who, apart from the Lord Jesus, would never tolerate compromise over the things of Christ and the Church’s inheritance, that man was the Apostle Paul.
Here we have him blazing and flaming in jealousy over what he wanted his people to have, when it seemed to be threatened and in danger. Is love? Love can be like that, you see—the same love, the same love.
Well, that we would be corrected by this, because, dear friends, we can sacrifice by a false conception of what we term love, which is no love at all.
There is need—not for this only; God forbid that this should be the only kind of love that we have—but there is need for this to have a place amongst us. Whatever it means and costs, however involved we are going to be with others, we are not going to let down one whit of all that which the Lord has revealed to us as being His will.
We are not going to sacrifice one iota. We are not going to compromise on any point, under any consideration, where the fullness of Christ is concerned.
I pass hurriedly to the Letter to the Ephesians. Do not worry; I am not going to keep you more than a few minutes longer.
We come to the Letter to the Ephesians, and if anywhere love reaches dimensions and magnitude, it is here. I bid you go back and just read it through. You can read the whole thing through in twenty minutes. Read it through again.
But is it not in this very letter that we have those incomparable and matchless words about love: “That ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge”?
There is no doubt about love here—oh, the conception and expression of love in this letter. But many people are afraid of the Letter to the Ephesians.
They are afraid of it. Perhaps they are tired of it. Afraid because it is so big—it is too big. It defeats us. It is too deep. It carries us so far out of our depth. That is quite true; that is quite true.
I was saying to someone only a few days ago that, after nearly fifty years—or more than fifty years—of reading and studying this letter, I do not feel that I have gone anywhere with it yet.
My one longing has been for a long time past that I could have a group of people to whom I could just get down with this letter alone, to plumb some of its depths. But that is by the way. I am saying it is so big, but because it is like this, many are afraid of it.
And their reaction is, “Oh, let us have something more simple, something that we can understand and grasp. This is beyond that.”
You see, that is just the setting of love here—the meaning of love. Here in this letter the apostle is abandoning himself, and that is not too strong a word, to give his fullness to the Church.
He is near the end of his course. All through that long course, he has been gathering and gathering spiritual knowledge, coming to see more and more of the vast ranges and profound depths of Jesus Christ.
At last, taken away from all the outward activities of church responsibility and travel, shut up, he has the opportunity—the time—to just pour into these last documents all that he has got, pouring it out without reserve.
You say, “And in so doing, he is just overwhelming us, and crushing us, and beating us, and breaking us.” But what is the interpretation of love in that? Listen, friends, listen.
Love is never going, if it is true love, to allow us to settle down into the smug comfort of smallness and narrowness and littleness. Our natures want that. We want that.
We do not like to be stretched. We do not like to be expanded. We do not like to be pulled out of our depths. We do not like to have big demands laid upon us. And if they are, we do not think it very kind and very loving to make such demands upon us, to call upon us to rise to such things.
But love does that. The love of God is never going to leave us with less than all that He meant us to have. If it means training and taxing, even exacting, if it seems like that, His love wants us drawn to the full dimensions: that we may know the breadth, and the length, and the height, and the depth.
This letter is a letter of immense expanses of Christ. The Church has got to know, by the Spirit of revelation, what those expanses are. And if we sometimes feel overwhelmed, broken, stand back and say, “I cannot rise to that. I cannot answer to that,” love is not going to let us off. It is going to work and work until we have capacity beyond what is natural.
Capacity is an important thing when it comes to the end, is it not?
I hurry to the end then. Philippians—thank God for Philippians. Oh, here is love in another aspect. Here is love rejoicing, love overflowing, love with an unshadowed smile on its face. Love thanks; love appreciates.
“My brethren beloved and longed for, my joy and crown, my beloved.”
Very little correction in this letter. A touch of correction just at one point is so wrapped up in love and kindness that you hardly feel the sting of it. No correction here; there is no fiery, jealous burning, blazing here. No—love in joy, real joy. Glad that it can be like that.
There are some peculiar factors which make it possible for love to be like that. Why this aspect? It is an aspect—God grant that it were more possible for love, the love of the Lord, to be like this always with us.
But there are some things, you see, that make it possible, and I can only just put my finger on one or two, point them out, and leave them.
One was this, and it comes out so clearly in the letter—you read it again: the very true, real valuation of the gospel, of the ministry that had come to them, and of the vessels who had carried the burden for them.
Such an evaluation, born out of suffering. You never value anything unless you suffer for it. You only value a thing in the measure in which you have entered into suffering for it.
These people undoubtedly had had to pay a heavy price in suffering for the gospel, for what they had received. We know the history of Philippi, do we not? We know it started in suffering, started in a prison with the messengers lashed and bleeding.
And these Philippians had entered into that sort of thing, and they had suffered for the truth and with the Lord’s messenger. They had come through suffering to recognise that this thing was no cheap business. This was costly—of infinite cost.
It cost Christ everything. It cost Paul everything. That is what is in this matter: He emptied Himself, and Paul says, “What things were gain to me, these have I counted loss.” It was costly.
And they had, in spirit, entered into the costliness of what had come to them. They had a deep valuation and appreciation of it. And when it is like that, a smile comes into the Lord’s face, and love just beams, for these people have recognised that what has come to them has not come easily, has not come cheaply.
This thing is a costly thing, and they had entered into it in their own hearts and in their own lives and experiences. They had suffered with their Lord.
“It is given to you”—listen—“it is given to you in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on Him, but also to suffer in His behalf.” They knew it, and they held very, very preciously what had come to them.
No wonder the apostle’s heart was ravished. No wonder the heart of the Lord Jesus rejoiced. No wonder He could speak like this: “My brethren beloved and longed for.”
Think where we started. Do we want the Lord to be able to speak of us like this? It will be on this ground.
But note the practical aspects of love at Philippi. There is nothing sentimental; it is very practical.
Look again. See their thought for Paul. They lived with him in his sufferings. They sent to him for the amelioration of his hardships. They ministered to him in a practical way.
He had to say that the Corinthians had not done that. They had not done that; they were so self-centred. But of these Philippians: there is Paul, Paul, Paul, away there in Rome. He must be having a difficult time. He must be having a hard time. He must be in need of help, of financial help. He must be sometimes hungry and cold. Let us do something about it.
They thought. They cared. They showed concern. And they sent, even unto sacrifice. That is love.
“My beloved, and longed for.” This attitude of the Lord toward us, this standing in the compass of His love like this, is joyful. Now, it is set in the very practical realm of suffering and of service.
The Lord give us that.