In Matthew 13, beginning at Matthew 13:24—I am going through all the parables, and I think most of you know them pretty well—we read:
The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man that sowed good seed in his field:
but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares also among the wheat, and went away.
But when the blade sprang up and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also.
And the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst thou not sow good seed in thy field? Whence then hath it tares?
And he said unto them, An enemy hath done this.
And the servants say unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up?
But he saith, Nay; lest haply while ye gather up the tares, ye root up the wheat with them.
Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather up first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them; but gather the wheat into my barn.
Another parable set He before them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like unto a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field:
which indeed is less than all seeds: but when it is grown, it is greater than the herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the heaven come and lodge in the branches thereof.
Another parable spake He unto them: The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till it was all leavened.
All these things spake Jesus in parables unto the multitudes; and without a parable spake He nothing unto them:
that it might be fulfilled which was spoken through the prophet, saying,
I will open My mouth in parables;
I will utter things hidden from the foundation of the world.
Then He left the multitudes, and went into the house: and His disciples came unto Him, saying, Explain unto us the parable of the tares of the field.
And He answered and said, He that soweth the good seed is the Son of man; and the field is the world; and the good seed, these are the sons of the kingdom; and the tares are the sons of the evil one; and the enemy that sowed them is the devil: and the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are angels.
As therefore the tares are gathered up and burned with fire, so shall it be in the end of the world. The Son of man shall send forth His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that cause stumbling, and them that do iniquity, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth. Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He that hath ears, let him hear.
The kingdom of heaven is like unto a treasure hidden in the field; which a man found, and hid; and in his joy he goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field.
Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a merchant seeking goodly pearls: and having found one pearl of great price, he went and sold all that he had, and bought it.
Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind: which, when it was filled, they drew up on the beach; and they sat down, and gathered the good into vessels, but the bad they cast away. So shall it be in the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the righteous, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth.
Have ye understood all these things?
They say unto Him, Yea.
And He said unto them, Therefore every scribe who hath been made a disciple to the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a householder, who bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.
Lord, we just want to bow here in Your presence. All we want to do is recognize that without You, we could do nothing. But You have provided us with an anointing.
And Lord, You can, through that anointing, renew our minds and renew our bodies. You can, through that anointing, open my mouth so that I can speak Your word. And through that anointing, You can give us that kind of hearing whereby we hear Your voice and understand.
Lord, then we commit this time into Your hands with thanksgiving, in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.
Well, it is a bit too late now to say that the theme of this conference is The King Is Coming. I think you all know that. My responsibility has been the parables in Matthew 13.
In the times for which I have been responsible, we have considered the phrases that appear in this thirteenth chapter: the word of the kingdom, the mysteries of the kingdom, and the sons of the kingdom.
Now tonight, in a way that I think really does sum up all that we have said, I want to consider the phrase in Matthew 13:52:
Every scribe who hath been made a disciple to the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a householder, who bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.
A disciple to the kingdom of heaven. The very phrase, to me, is suggestive. I do not know how it is rendered in the old Authorized Version. It is a marvelous version, but it is not always so accurate.
You will notice that when I talk about sons of the kingdom, you all have “children of the kingdom.” “Children” and “sons” are translated interchangeably, sometimes quite arbitrarily, in the old King James Version.
Now, I think it is a very interesting rendering, this literal one that I have here: “a disciple to the kingdom of heaven.” It is as if the Lord has phrased this marvelous little phrase in a way that should make us stop for a moment.
Why did He not say, “disciples of the kingdom of heaven”? Why did He say, “disciples to the kingdom of heaven”? It is almost as if He is saying, “You are a disciple to something that is coming.”
You are not only a disciple of something that is in existence, but you are being prepared for something that is going to have its public manifestation in a day that is to come. Everything that the Lord is doing to a scribe who is being made a disciple is in the light of that kingdom—in the light of the coming of our Lord Jesus.
Therefore, to me, this phrase suggests training in the light of the coming kingdom; education in the light of the coming kingdom; instruction in the things of God and in the ways of God, in the light of the coming kingdom; discipling for the kingdom that is coming.
Consider for a moment this word kingdom. Of course, I do not know how you over here understand it. In the United States, I imagine you consider the word kingdom as something somewhat antique.
But for those of us who have been brought up in a kingdom, the word generally conjures up the idea of territory. It conjures up not merely the idea of a throne and someone who reigns on that throne, but it conjures up a territory.
For instance, the official name of Britain—that is, England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland—is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. That is its official term. The moment you think of a kingdom, you think of those isles.
Now, I know Americans are not very good on geography. I remember years ago, when I was in the Garden Tomb, an American lady said to a lady from New Zealand, “Oh, you do speak good English.” The lady said, “Well, I should. I come from New Zealand.” “New Zealand,” she said, “that is somewhere near Holland, is it not?”
Now, I know that Americans are not always too good on geography, but when you think of the kingdom—whether it is the United Kingdom, the Danish kingdom, or the Dutch kingdom—you have a picture of the geography of that country.
But the Greek does not quite mean that. We cannot put into English exactly what this Greek word means because it has, at one and the same time, two ideas. It has both the throne and the reign and the territory.
That is why my dear old Brother Sparks used to say that he liked the word kingship. When I first heard this, it transformed my whole idea:
Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
I thought that transformed it for me, because suddenly I got the idea. It is not just territory to reign over—not this idea Christians have of draped golden thrones, lazily waving their hands to angels to bring them coffee or tea, depending on their origin—or Coca-Cola.
No, it suddenly transformed it for me that this kingdom into which you and I have been born, this kingdom to which we are being discipled, this kingdom for which you and I are made, by the grace of God, candidates, is a matter of kingship.
Therefore, if it is kingship, one immediately begins to understand the necessity of training. You have to be trained for kingship. You have to be educated for kingship.
Some people might say, “Well, why do we need to be trained for the kingdom? We are going to be ruled over, are we not? The Lord Jesus is going to do all the ruling and the reigning.” But if you get the idea of kingship and not just territory, then you understand.
Of course, it includes the idea of territory, because there is going to be a new heaven and a new earth in the end. The whole is called the kingdom of God. The earth and its fullness, the world, and they that dwell therein, belong to the kingdom of our Lord.
There is a marvelous statement at the end of the seventh trumpet:
The kingdom of the world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ: and He shall reign for ever and ever.
Well now, my dear friends, when you think of it as kingship, I think that puts a slightly different complexion on it. Every scribe that has been made a disciple to the kingship of heaven is like a householder.
I spoke yesterday morning about the sons of the kingdom. You can be a baby, and you can be a male child. In that sense, you are a son; but you cannot administer your father’s business, and you cannot supervise your parents’ property.
You are a baby. You have a genetic history in your flesh and blood. You have a name that has been given to you. You belong to your parents. You are born of your parents. But you have got to grow. You have got to know discipline. You have got to be educated.
You have to have a character that is developed before you can take over the family business, before you can inherit what is yours in a way that will not fritter it away.
Once we begin to see that, I believe so much falls into place. That is why it is so important, in my estimation, to differentiate between the Greek word that is always and rightly translated children and the other Greek word that should be rightly translated sons.
Again and again—not in every instance, but again and again—whenever the word of God is speaking about sons, it is speaking of maturity: “bringing many sons unto glory”; “He that overcometh shall inherit these things; and I will be his God, and he shall be My son.”
The idea is of someone who has grown up from babyhood, through spiritual childhood, into maturity, and has become a son of his father—able to sit on the throne, able to share in the government of God, able to administer the will of God in the ages to come.
If you look at Romans 8, you have this whole thing. In a sense, what we are talking about when we talk about discipling is this whole matter from another angle.
In Romans 8:14, we read:
For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.
For ye received not the spirit of bondage again unto fear; but ye received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.
The Spirit Himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God:
and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified with Him.
Now, you have the whole thing in these few verses. Whether you take the view that this adoption is the Gentile form of adoption, in which a child of another parentage is legally adopted, or whether you take it as the Jewish picture of the placing of a son, the fact of the matter is that sons have to grow.
Mr. Sparks preferred what he felt to be an illustration borrowed from Jewish custom. A child, a son, is circumcised on the eighth day. That is the covenant of circumcision. But when he is thirteen years of age, he has his bar mitzvah. He becomes a son of the law, a son of the commandment, and is recognized as a young man with responsibility in the house of Israel.
He believed that the spirit of adoption was that, and he liked the translation, “the spirit of placing as sons.” Maybe it is a little forced; I do not know. But all I know is this: what he felt and taught brought him into much controversy, but I have no doubt in my heart about the truth of it.
Whether adoption is the Gentile adoption or whether it is the Jewish bar mitzvah, the fact of the matter is that sons have to grow.
Most of you, unless you have just been born spiritually in this last week, and most of you who have been a few years old in the Lord, must surely have observed that the vast majority of Christians are not led by the Spirit.
Does that mean they are not sons of God? It says:
For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.
I know many people who are always saying, “The Spirit told me to do this. The Spirit told me to do that.” They go from one thing to another, from one mess into another mess. The spirit apparently leads them into a mess, then another mess, and another mess. Such people are not led by the Spirit.
But we also know people who are truly led by the Spirit. The thing we always recognize with such people is maturity. They have experience of the Lord. They have spiritual growth. They have the development of spiritual character. They have some kind of education. The word of the Lord has got into them. It has taken root in them. It is growing in them.
Those who are truly led of the Lord are a thrilling thing to meet: a child of God, a servant of God, who has a real story through his or her life of being led by the Lord. How it encourages us; how it strengthens our faith in the Lord; how it inspires trust in us that we also can trust God and know His leading.
But these people are never wishy-washy people. They are never merely emotional people. There is nothing wrong with emotion, but when it is only emotional, there is everything wrong.
When you find people who are truly led by the Spirit of God, there is a glory about them. Those who are led by the Spirit have learned to distinguish the mind of the Lord. They have learned to sense what the Lord is saying in them.
They have learned a way through fellowship with other brothers and sisters—not slavishly following brothers and sisters, but really checking with brothers and sisters. They have learned how to stand on their own two feet in the presence of the Lord and know the Lord for themselves, and at the same time operate within real fellowship with other brethren.
As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God. They have grown up. They are coming to maturity. They are coming to full growth. They are the sons of the kingdom.
You have not received a spirit of bondage again unto fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption, or the spirit of placing as sons, whereby you cry, “Abba, Father.” You are born of God, born of the Spirit of God, and something within you cries out. God is not merely some infinite Being out there; He is Father. There is an intimate relationship with Him.
Then it says that the Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. That is being born of God. And if children, then heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ. This is what this whole matter of being sons of the kingdom is about. This is why we are being discipled to the kingdom.
We are heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ. We have an amazing inheritance that one day the Lord wants to lead us into—not just to enjoy, but to administer.
Then it says, so that we get this matter absolutely clear:
If so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified with Him.
This whole question of being discipled is a matter of discipline. And discipline, depending on the way you look at it, has a certain amount of suffering in it. It does not necessarily mean agonizing pain.
It can just mean:
Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me.
Now, I suggest that for many—especially some of the fellows here—it is the hardest thing in the world to have a yoke upon you. And I will tell you something else: it is much easier to have your personal yoke than to find that you have got a double yoke.
I am not talking about husbands or wives just at present. It is true that Scripture speaks about being not unequally yoked together, but in Matthew 11:29 Jesus said:
Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
This is a double yoke. We like to feel that if we are going to have a yoke on us, we can initiate the pace. If we want to go slow, we will go slow. If we want to go fast, we will go fast. If for some reason we want to stop and have a little munch on grass by the wayside, we will have a little munch on the grass by the wayside.
“Do not worry,” we would say to the farmer. “It will get done. Leave it to me. Trust me. I do not mind having this yoke upon me, but I want to go at my own pace. I want to decide when we start and how fast we go.”
But this yoke is a double yoke. Think about it for a moment. That is where suffering comes in. Very often we think of suffering only in terms of terrible agonizing pain. But we do not think of suffering as having a yoke upon us.
It is not so easy. Yet I have always been amazed at the word of God. Perhaps it is because, when I was young, I never read the word of God. So when I first discovered it, literally from the day I discovered it, I was enthralled.
Through all the years, I will not say that I have not suffered as a result of some of what I found within the word of God. But I have always found that the end is glory.
In Deuteronomy 22:10, it says:
Thou shalt not plow with an ox and an ass together.
I travel quite a bit, and I often see donkeys and oxen yoked together doing the work. Why did God say that you should not yoke a donkey with an ox? Because an ox is at least two feet higher than a donkey. Furthermore, a donkey, when it wants to, can go quite fast, while an ox is always slow.
If you yoke two creatures like that, they are unequally yoked. Both of them will suffer. The ox will get sores across its shoulders, and so will the donkey.
The wonderful thing is this: when Jesus said, “Take My yoke upon you,” I think to myself, could there be a more unequal yoking in the world? Is there anyone greater and more marvelous than the Lord Jesus? And is there anyone more hopeless than me? No, you do not have to say anything there. Think of yourself.
Yet the Lord, in some marvelous way, says that His yoke means He will be yoked with us. We are yoked together. How do we learn of Him? We walk with Him. We walk with Him.
We learn that we are together in this thing. We are yoked together in the service of the Lord. Once you begin to see this, the matter of suffering becomes something different. It is a matter of training. It is a matter of learning of the Lord. It is a matter of discovering that His yoke is easy and His burden is light.
Many of us have a terrible fear of the Lord’s yoke. We feel that once that yoke comes upon us, we might as well forget laughter, forget joy, forget lightness, forget every thought of self-fulfillment.
We imagine that life, from the moment the Lord’s yoke comes upon us, is going to be miserable, vacuous, and heavy—a long succession of doing everything we never wanted to do and forsaking everything we ever wanted to do.
And this is what Jesus said:
Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light.
It is exactly the opposite of what we think. We think that if we take the yoke upon us, it will be heavy, hard, and chafing; all pain, all agony, miserable emptiness. But the Lord says, if you are weary and heavy laden, come to Me. I can give you rest. How do we get that rest? By taking His yoke upon us.
The only way we find rest unto our souls. Our souls are normally the center of our disturbance. Mine is, anyway; I do not know about you.
I find that all the problem is in my soul. It gets disturbed about things, restless, neurotic at times. It gets all worked up, and it is in my soul that I have all the disturbance—not in my spirit. My spirit is reasonably happy with the Lord, if you understand what I mean. But my soul is the problem.
My soul is always having an argument with the Lord. My soul is always telling the Lord what He should do. My soul is always saying, “Lord, if You would give me this and this and this, I would be happy.”
But the Lord said, “Ye shall find rest unto your souls.” Here we have a paradox: only the true disciple is a person at rest.
The Christian who is not a disciple is often the most miserable of all people. They are neither-nor people. They are not in the world, yet they are trying to live in the world. They are not truly walking with the Lord Jesus. They are neither-nor.
There is nothing more miserable than a neither-nor existence. The child of God is not the darkened, blind sinner who can have a seared conscience. The child of God is someone whose conscience is awake, unfortunately.
If he does not go the whole way with the Lord, he spends his whole time with a conscience. Every time he enjoys something in the world, he has a little conscience—and after a conference like this, he is going to have a bigger one.
Every time you are sitting in the cinema, you think, “Would the Lord like this? He is coming back tonight. Is what I am watching all right?” You have a kind of conscience all the time, in everything you do. I call that weary and heavy laden.
The Lord has beautifully described it: weary and heavy laden. I see sometimes dear believers coming into meetings. They are obviously weary and heavy laden. They drag themselves in and sit there.
Yet the person who is a disciple, who has been discipled to the kingdom, is someone who has found rest unto his soul.
Even the Lord Jesus learned something about this. In Hebrews 5:8-9, it says:
Though He was a Son, yet learned obedience by the things which He suffered;
and having been made perfect, He became unto all them that obey Him the author of eternal salvation.
I do not know how this really applies to the Lord Jesus. This word perfect does not mean that the Lord Jesus was imperfect. It is the Greek word meaning mature, full, complete. Jesus came to maturity. He came to full growth.
Through the things which He suffered, He learned the value of obedience. He actually learned, though without sin, having never sinned, through obeying His Father, the full value of obedience. It was a discipline.
This is the way that every son whom He is bringing to glory has to go. There are no exceptions.
Then you begin to understand the other Scripture we looked at last night, Hebrews 12:5-6:
My son, regard not lightly the chastening of the Lord,
nor faint when thou art reproved of Him;
for whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth,
and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.
Remember, I translated that last night as child training. Whom the Lord loves, He trains as a child. There is a whole passage there. We do not have time to look at it, but I am sure you will.
If I could take this a step further, I want to talk just a little while about being discipled for the throne. You are a royal child. You are being educated, trained, and developed in character with the throne in view.
You are being discipled in a way that ordinary good fish in the kingdom are not, because the Lord has a special place for you. He does not push us. Within our very salvation, within our very new birth, is a calling, is a destiny: that we should reign with Christ.
We can either reject it, ignore it, bypass it, or commit ourselves to it.
There are three things I want to dwell on, and then I want finally to conclude.
The first thing I want to talk about is discipling and the word of God—or, put another way, the word of God and being discipled by the Lord Jesus. Every part of your training has to do with the word of God.
The first thing we understand is this: the word of God has to be learned. We have to learn the word of God. That is quite different from merely superficially reading or easily listening.
To learn the word of God means that we become, as the Lord uses the word, a scribe. Very often in Christian circles, scribes, like Pharisees, are considered black. There is much in the word of God about the hypocrisy and artificiality of the scribes.
But here, at the end of these parables, Jesus uses the word scribe in exactly the way it is meant to be used. Every scribe that is made a disciple to the kingdom of heaven.
What is a scribe? A scribe is a scholar. A scribe is a student of Scripture—a serious student of Scripture. That is what a scribe is meant to be.
Many scribes had gone far from what they were meant to be, but they were interpreters of the law because they studied the law. They studied the word of God. They delved into it. They meditated upon it day and night. They sought to get to the heart of what it meant.
In our circles, we say every day—in my home we say it every day in Hebrew—Deuteronomy 6:
Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord:
and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be upon thy heart:
and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thy hand, and they shall be for frontlets between thine eyes.
And thou shalt write them upon the door-posts of thy house, and upon thy gates.
Does it mean anything to you? What the Lord was saying was this: this word that He has given us has got to be learned. It has to be studied. It has to be meditated upon.
It has to be, as it were, the beginning of the day and the end of the day and everything in between. It has to be on your heart, on your arm, between your eyes, on your gates, and on your doors.
What was the Lord saying? Was He merely saying, as it is understood among my people, that you nail it on the door, on the gate, and on every door in your house so that when you go through, you touch it and remind yourself of the word of the Lord? Is that all it meant?
Does it mean that phylacteries should be put upon your arm only, or round your head between your eyes, with no understanding? What does it mean?
It comes out of this:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
How is that to be expressed? By the word of the Lord being in your heart, between your eyes, on your arm, on your gates, and on your doors. The word of the Lord has to be loved.
There is no way you can be a disciple to the kingdom of heaven unless that word of the Lord becomes for you the beginning and the end. Is it not remarkable that Jesus calls Himself the Alpha and the Omega—the first letter of the Greek alphabet and the last letter of the Greek alphabet?
It is as if, once again, He is bringing to us this whole thing: you will find the whole word of God in Him, wonderfully expressed in His life, in His nature, and in His work.
If you are going to be a disciple to the kingdom of heaven, then this word of the Lord is to be learned. Unless you give time for it, and unless you have heart toward God, you will never learn the word of God. The enemy will see to it that you fill your life until you are too old to study anymore.
The second thing is this: the word of God has to be experienced. It is not enough merely to put it on bookcases and memorize it. That word has to become yours.
The first time the Spirit of the Lord made something real to me was when I understood that the Spirit of the Lord was in me. I had read it so many times. It had never been revealed to me. But in that day when I saw it, it was as if heaven opened.
I cannot explain it. It was as if a great Amazon tide flooded me and swirled around me, and I have never been the same since.
I could not care less if people said, “Oh, you have become a Pentecostal.” I was not in a Pentecostal church. I saw something.
I suppose I must have read it a thousand times. I was sixteen. I was saved when I was twelve, and I had not had a whole Bible until I was thirteen or fourteen. But once I had a Bible, I read and read and read it.
Yet it had never come home to me that the Spirit of the Lord was in me and upon me. When that was revealed to me, I heard the word with understanding. It became mine.
I shall never forget when I saw that I had been crucified with Christ. I had done my best to Christianize myself. I put Canaanite phraseology in my lips, and I had beaten myself into prayer.
My mother said she had a monk for a son and a nun for a daughter. That was how she described it to other friends: “I do not know what has got hold of those children of mine.”
But inside, I was the most unhappy person. It was religion. I was trying to live a Christian life in the energy of the old man. I was doing my best to make a saint of my old man.
Have you ever done that? It is a terrible job—to try to Christianize your old man or your old woman. Go on, just try. You will come to the same end I came to: absolute desperation.
I remember that day when that word came to me:
I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself up for me.
It shone into my heart in such a way that I rose, and that was it. I honestly can say it was as if shackles fell off me, as if a huge burden on my back rolled away. I cannot explain it.
I actually thought I had not been saved. I thought, “Now I have been saved.” Now I look back, I know I was saved four years before that. But at the time I thought, “I have not been saved. Now I am saved.” Thank God for that.
I could not explain it to anybody. They all thought I was a bit weird—my Christian friends. I was in the Baptist church, and they all thought, “What has bitten him?”
Well, I must not talk about myself, but at least I can tell you that what I am saying is not secondhand. I saw this myself.
I remember the first time I saw a little word in 1 Corinthians 12:
So also is Christ.
Can you believe that? “So also is Christ.” First Corinthians 12:12.
I had read a little booklet by Mr. Sparks. I had heard that he was a bit strange. My Christian friends told me, “You be careful of him. He is a Celtic figure.” So I wondered very much.
Anyway, I read this book, and he said, “So you can see the church is Christ.” I remember closing the book and putting it in my pocket. I was walking beside the River Thames.
I thought to myself, “Now I know what is wrong with that man. Any fool could tell you the church is not Christ. Christ is the Head. Every Christian ought to know that. He says the church is Christ. How can he say such a thing?”
I thought my friends were right. The man was off centre. He was unbalanced. One had to be careful.
But the Lord has great humour. The next morning, my reading began with 1 Corinthians 12:12:
For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ.
I read it and looked at it. I said, “Now, this must be a bad translation. It must mean, ‘So also is the body of which Christ is Head.’”
So I looked in different versions, and I found they were all clearer than ever. They said, “So also is Christ.” Then I was stunned. Stunned.
I thought, “I do not understand it, Lord. Maybe that man—meaning Mr. Sparks—maybe that man is right.”
Then into my heart came a voice—not audible, but as real as an audible voice—saying, “Your head is not Norman, but your body is not Norman either.” In a flash, I saw it.
A body is nothing if it has not a head, and a head is nothing if it has not a body. Have you ever seen a living headless body? Have you ever seen a living bodiless head? The whole idea is that head and body belong to each other.
In a flash I saw it: “So also is Christ.” It was like a revelation that blew my mind completely. Suddenly I saw how wonderful this salvation is. I am in Christ, and I have become part of Christ because I am a member of His body.
I am part of the Christ. I belong to Him. When I pray in His name, I am praying as part of His body. Oh, it was just so wonderful.
Now, of course, I do not know whether it is wonderful to you. What I am saying is this: here is the word of God. We can read the word of God as doctrine. We can read these things as truth. Yet they may not mean anything to us.
I told you about that old titled lady yesterday morning. I will tell you another story about her that always deeply moved me.
Many years ago, she was terribly ill mentally. She had really served the Lord with all her strength, but in her own energy, and she had worn herself out. Her mind began to go.
In those days, it was considered something you never mentioned—something very shameful—to be mentally ill. The top private specialists said, “You have to go into hospital.”
“Oh,” she said, “what kind of hospital?”
“I am very sorry,” he said. “It will have to be a mental hospital.”
“I am a child of God,” she said.
“I am afraid,” he said, “it makes no difference with the Lord where you go.”
Having agreed, the ambulance was brought, and nothing happened. They came to take her. She was a stretcher case. As she went in through the gates of that place, the shame was so huge. “Lord,” she said, “I am entering hell.”
Immediately into her heart came the word from Psalm 139:
If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, Thou art there.
She said it came with such a force of revelation into her spirit. If she had not known the word of God, how could the Holy Spirit have brought it to her? But because she had studied the word and learned the word, the Holy Spirit took something buried deep within her memory and shot it into her heart.
“If I make my bed in hell, even there Thou art.” Suddenly she said, “I smiled and thought, ‘The Lord is here.’”
When the doctors came, they said, “What is wrong with you? You are perfectly well.” And she walked out.
Oh, how wonderful it is when the Lord gives you something and makes His word real to you. When it comes into you, then it is yours. Nobody can take it away. It is your word.
It is something that has become flesh and blood. It is implanted in you. It has taken root in you. It is growing in you. Do you not see how wonderful the word of God is?
There is one other thing I want to talk about in connection with the word before moving on: the word divides.
In Hebrews 4:12, it says:
For the word of God is living, and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit.
I find this very interesting. If you are going to be a disciple to the kingdom of heaven, if you are going to grow up to be a son of the kingdom, then this spiritual surgery has to take place within. There has to be a division between soul and spirit.
Some people say, “I do not understand what you are talking about. Surely soul and spirit are synonymous.” No, they are not.
Have you ever noticed in those wonderful Psalms things like this?
Be still, my soul.
Now just wait. Who is talking to whom? “Be still, my soul.” Is the brain talking to the soul? Who is talking to whom?
Bless the Lord, O my soul;
and all that is within me, bless His holy name.
Who is talking to whom? You remember Psalm 131:2:
Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with his mother,
my soul is with me as a weaned child.
You rocked your soul to sleep. Who is doing it? Who is talking to whom? You have to understand the Hebrew mentality. The heart, the spirit—that is the centre. The inward parts—the kidneys and liver, if I may put it bluntly—that is the soul.
It is your spirit that, even in the Old Testament, says to your soul, “Be still.” That is spiritual government. The spirit says, “I quieten my soul like a weaned child. I have hushed it to sleep. I have brought it into quietness, into stillness.”
Have you ever noticed Mary’s marvelous exclamation of praise in what we call the Magnificat?
My soul doth magnify the Lord,
and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
It began in her spirit and came through her soul. Her spirit rejoiced, and then her soul magnified. That is the right way.
Have you ever noticed in worship that when it begins with the soul and ends with the soul, there is something not quite clean about it? I am not joking. At least I feel it. You feel somehow that there is something not quite clean about the worship.
There may be a right song, but it is the soul. When it begins in the spirit, when the Spirit of the Lord stirs up our spirit and we rejoice in the Lord, then it comes out in our soul in song. How else do you sing?
Sometimes we sing one way, and other times we sing with feeling. When it starts with the spirit, then the soul is employed, and the whole being praises the Lord. Do you understand what I am trying to say?
How does this division come about? Through the word of the Lord. I cannot think of any realm in Christian work where there is more delusion, deception, unrest, trouble, counterfeit, falsehood, and error than in the realm of the soul.
Few servants of God and few children of God are prepared for the Lord to deal with our soul and divide between soul and spirit.
Now I must go on, otherwise we shall never get anywhere. I must talk about the work of being conformed to the image of Christ and discipling.
Listen carefully to me: no one can reach the throne and reign with Christ who is not conformed to His image. The Father will not allow anyone to come to that throne who does not bear the likeness of the Lord Jesus. We have to be conformed to His image in order to reign with Him.
Now we make a tremendous discovery. Do you remember those two parables which He spoke privately to His disciples? A certain man found a treasure in a field, hid it, and went and bought the field. Another man found a pearl of great price and went away and sold all that he had and bought that one pearl.
Some people have interpreted these parables as being about our discovering the Lord Jesus. We have that lovely hymn: “I found the pearl of greatest price; who can tell His worth?”
But actually, I think this parable is a picture of the Lord Jesus giving everything He has to obtain the treasure that is His right. It is the Lord Jesus, in one sense, selling all that He had that He might obtain the Bride.
Is it not interesting? We have treasure, and He buys the whole field to get it. We have pearl, and He sells everything He has in order to get the pearl. Then we have a quite different parable: a dragnet.
In this dragnet, every kind of thing is gathered in—jellyfish and bottles, and if it were today, plastic bags and I do not know what else. Then they sit down, put the good fish into vessels, and throw all the rubbish away.
But think: there is all the world of difference between fish—even good fish—and treasure; and between good fish and pearl.
Does that mean that all the Lord Jesus is interested in is getting good fish? Good fish of the kingdom of God?
Let me say to you again, as I said yesterday morning: do you want to be a good fish, or do you want to be the treasure He is looking for? Do you want to be just good fish, saved by His grace, born of His Spirit, but not the pearl that means everything to Him?
You have an eternity one day. Do you want to be just a good fish for all eternity, or do you want to be the Bride? Do you want to be the city of God?
That city of God, that Bride, is made of treasure—gold, precious stones, and pearl. Only three materials. No others, only three materials.
Now we make a great discovery. In one sense, that old hymn we sing is right, because I have no pearl in me. I have no treasure in me, and neither do you—naturally.
However much we may know the Bible, even if we are saved, in ourselves we have no treasure in us, have we? We have no pearl.
Who is the treasure in you? And who is the treasure in me? Is it not the Lord Jesus? Is it not a picture of the excellencies and beauties of the nature and character of the Lord Jesus?
If you and I want to become that treasure, it is all of grace. It is given to us in the Lord Jesus. But listen to me: it is all of grace. It is God’s free gift, but it will cost you everything.
It will cost you your self-life. It requires a life laid down, or your self-life will effectively stop any treasure from ever being worked in you. Your self-life will see that any grit in you remains grit.
But if I lay down my self-life, the gracious operation of God can cover that grit, layer upon layer, until it becomes a pearl.
You cannot be a disciple to the kingdom of heaven if you do not have treasure.
Every scribe that is made a disciple to the kingdom of heaven is like a householder, who brings out from his treasure things both new and old.
Gold. Precious stone. Pearl.
Jesus said:
I counsel thee to buy of Me gold refined by fire, that thou mayest become rich.
Or I think of the words of the prophet Isaiah:
I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places.
Gold has to go through fire. Precious stones are produced under great pressure and with great heat.
That is the second thing about being discipled.
Here is the third thing. I want to talk about the disciple and the devil. The devil and being discipled.
“Oh,” you say, “the devil has nothing to do with being discipled.” Oh, my dear friend, he certainly does.
C. T. Studd once said that he could never understand Satan because he was God’s greatest servant. That was a way of saying that God always uses the devil to do some of His choicest work.
I wish that I really had time to deal fully with such a subject as this, because it is an extraordinary one. The parable of the tares is not the church; it is the world.
Think for a moment about tares and wheat growing together unto harvest. You say, “No, no, no. The only way the Lord can perfect good wheat is to put it in a little plot all of its own, far away from any works of the enemy, far away from the sons of evil.”
No, not at all. Let me try to explain, if you are still alive enough at this hour to take it in.
Do you know that the Apostle Paul wrote his greatest letters, his greatest revelations, when he was nearest to the tares?
You know what he calls himself in Ephesians? “The prisoner of the Lord.” But from one point of view, he was a prisoner of Rome. He says, “No, I do not look at the tares. I look at the Lord.”
The tares are all around me. I feel their roots. They are all intertwined with mine. But I am an ambassador in chains.
Do you know what that meant? While he was dictating the letter, he had a chain to a Roman guard—a tare. Wheat and tare.
Let me give you another example. These are dramatic examples. I am not suggesting that you are necessarily going to have such experiences, though I know some of our brothers here have had them.
I think of John on the Isle of Patmos. Tares and wheat all around him. Brutality all around him. Godlessness all around him. Hopelessness all around him.
Right in the midst of it, in a place that was a concentration camp where prisoners were worked to death, he had the greatest revelations that summed up the whole sixty-five books of the Bible.
Tares and wheat. He was so affected by the hopelessness of the situation and the godlessness of it that he was looking in the wrong direction. Then he heard a voice behind him, and turning, he saw the Lord.
Dear child of God, do you mean to tell me that you cannot put up with the much smaller tares in your life? Some of you are working with bosses that are tares. Some of you have employees that are tares.
Some of you have got a husband who is a tare, and some of you have got a wife who is a tare. Some of you have children that, sadly, are tares. Some of you have parents that are tares. All of us have relatives that are tares and are not born of God.
They do not care for the things of God, and they do not want the things of God. But they are intertwined with us, and we say, “Oh, Lord, tear up this tare. Tear it up, Lord. It is destroying me.”
And the Lord says, “Not at all. Not at all.”
This is the relationship of the work of the devil to discipling. God uses the devil who sowed these tares. We say, “Lord, root the whole thing up. Get it done with, Lord. I cannot serve You until the whole thing is taken up.”
And the Lord says, “No, no, no, no. Let them grow together until the harvest.”
I wish I could spend longer on this subject, because it is a tremendous subject and there is so much in the word of God about it. I hear Christians telling me that we are out of this world and have nothing to do with this world.
But I think of these words: “Be subject to the higher authorities and powers”; “be subject to every ordinance of man.” Some of these things are quite dark. Paul was talking about the Roman Empire. He was talking about godless magistrates, godless kings, and lords, and he was telling them to be subject to these things.
It is our attitude to the tares around us. We must not touch the evil one, but we render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.
For some reason, God allows the tares and the wheat to grow together. His sun shines on them, His rain comes upon both of them, and His dew comes upon both of them. No amount of trying to get rid of them will do you any good.
Can I quickly talk about the birds of the heaven and the leaven? This is where I have had my biggest problem in Matthew 13.
It seems to me—and this is only my personal view and interpretation—that the mustard seed has to have something to do with evil, because the Lord gives that interpretation at the end of the first of the trio.
Therefore, it seems to me that both the tares, the mustard seed, and the leaven have something to do with evil. Yet the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds, and it grows to a tree, sometimes as high as fourteen or fifteen feet.
Just because I have not seen birds nesting in it does not mean that they do not. But I know something about birds, and there is something about the mustard tree that would make it a peculiarly acrobatic feat to build a nest in it.
It is a pendulous tree that hangs down. You hardly ever see birds even sitting in the mustard tree. Therefore, I make a discovery.
Here is the life of God beginning with something very small, planted by the Sower, that grows up into a tree. Then into the tree come things that do not belong to it. They nest in it.
I immediately think of Ephesians 2:2:
Wherein ye once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the powers of the air, of the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience.
How terrible that into something that is of God, something produced by the life of God, something that is an expression of the life of God, there should be a walking according to the course of this world.
There should be some work of the prince of the powers of the air—the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience. He should get in.
My dear friends, you only have to study the history of the church to see this again and again and again. That which God has truly brought to birth, that which is developed by the grace and power of God—into it come the ways of this world.
Then into it comes the influence of the prince of the power of the air. Then, for the first time, that whole work begins to think like the world and act like the world. There are things nesting in that tree that have no business being there.
Now the parable of the leaven is quite different. It is much easier to frighten birds out of a tree than to get leaven out of flour.
Once leaven is in the flour, you cannot get it out. But if birds get into the tree, you can frighten them off. Get a cat. Do all kinds of things. Birds are very nervous creatures. You can get rid of them in an instant.
But leaven—when leaven gets into the flour, there is no way. That is why, in 1 Corinthians 5, the Apostle Paul says:
A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump. Purge out the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump.
He does not say, “Get rid of the leaven.” He knows you cannot. You have to get rid of the whole lump. You have to start again.
This is why I always say that in every work of God, when leaven gets into it at the beginning, there is no hope. This does not mean the Lord forsakes it. He still has precious children in such a thing, and He goes on with them.
But as far as the building work of His kingdom goes, it is over.
Discipling has a lot to do with how we get rid of the birds of the heaven that get into a tree and should not be there. Discipling also has a lot to do with the way we react to leaven.
I can only give you one Scripture because of time. It is Paul’s marvelous way of speaking about this. Second Timothy 2:19:
Howbeit the firm foundation of God standeth, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are His: and, Let every one that nameth the name of the Lord depart from unrighteousness.
Now he is talking about gangrene, interestingly, just like leaven—something eating into the whole body. Then he says:
Now in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth; and some unto honour, and some unto dishonour.
If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, meet for the master’s use, prepared unto every good work.
I think that is a commentary on this little parable of the leaven.
When we look at the church of God, my goodness, we can see leaven in the history of the church. I do not want to upset anybody here, but I could give you example after example.
The so-called sinlessness of the Virgin Mary—it was leaven. Then it went to the assumption of Mary, that she actually ascended.
In some places I go to—forgive me if I mention Austria or the Philippines—if I did not know, I would come away and say these people worship a goddess.
Leaven which leavens the whole lump. That is only one example; there are many others.
Once you say that the bread and the wine become the actual physical body and blood of Christ, then immediately you have produced a priestly caste that has to turn ordinary bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ. With that, a whole system grows.
Leaven leavens the whole lump. We look over church history and see it again and again.
But I do not want to think you have had enough for one day. Let me just take one other look at this matter.
All of us here, many of us in this building, have been in works that have truly been born of God. Then, to our horror, into the branches have come the birds of heaven—the birds of earth—things that do not belong there. What are we to do with it?
Many of us have been in works of God into which leaven has been introduced. At the beginning it was so small that we argued, “Can it really be wrong? I do not think it is. These people are such good people. There is so much life here. Look, God is still saving people. Look, people are being blessed.”
But leaven leavens the whole lump until, in the end, the whole thing becomes cultic. Now what shall we do?
May I say something that may, I hope, be of some help? If you and I have been deceived, deluded, and involved in something into which leaven has come, do not be angry with the leaders of that work.
I hear it everywhere I go—people ranting and raving about someone or other, naming this evil, saying, “They have done this. They have done that.” My dear friend, it is our normal psychological way of putting blame on somebody else.
If you have been deceived, there is something in you that can be deceived. If I can be deceived, there is something in me that can be deceived. We need to repent from such dead works.
When a person faces this—“Why was I deceived? Why did I introduce this person into this work? Why did I do this or that?”—then God can do something with you.
He can purge the old lump, and He can bring you into something that is pure. You have learned your lesson. But when it is always somebody else—“Well, he was so clever; I could not distinguish between this thing he said and that thing he said”—we never learn.
We have to repent.
Discipling and the devil. I think one day, when we are in glory, we shall have to admit that the Lord used the devil very much in discipling us.
The way we approach this whole question of leaven, the way we approach the birds of the air in the tree where they should not be, and our attitude to the tares all around us—these are the things the Lord uses to disciple us.
So, my dear friends, here we have the end of this matter: the King is coming. In these parables of the kingdom, Jesus sums it all up in this way:
Every scribe that is made a disciple to the kingdom of heaven is like unto a householder, that bringeth forth out of his treasure things both new and old.
A scribe—a student of the word of God—is not enough. A scribe that is made a disciple to the kingdom of heaven has to be a scribe and a disciple to the kingdom of heaven.
But there is something else: he must be a householder. That is someone who has to care for others, someone who has to take responsibility for other lives.
A householder. It is a very strange thing that every time God gives us a new revelation, we expel the old one. We turn our backs on everything that has passed and live only in whatever new thing He is showing us.
But it is not so. A householder can bring from his treasure things that are both new and old.
The Lord really prepares us for the coming of the King in no other way than by making us disciples.
Are you a disciple? Am I?
Lord, we do pray that You will not allow the real burden of Your word to be lost in any way upon any single one of us. Write it in our hearts, Lord. You are the only One who can do it.
We want, Lord, all of us, to really be disciples—disciples to the kingdom of heaven. We want, Lord, to be those who are being trained and educated and disciplined with that coming kingdom in view.
Dear Lord, will You wake us up in our hearts? Apply these words to us. Deliver us from false understanding.
And Lord, let Your word find a dwelling place in every one of our lives. We ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.