by
T. Austin-Sparks
Chapter 4 - In History and in Grace
Now all too briefly we must look at this other side.
Grace
Paul saw this wonderful majestic side, the Lordship, Kingship,
Headship, Sovereignty of Christ proceeding through history,
triumphant all the time. But he saw that the Eternal Purpose out
from the Eternal Counsels of God was also and only to be realised
upon a principle and basis of GRACE. We come immediately now to the
direct application of that principle without illustrating it at all
through the ages and in the greater revelations, but come right down
to what we ourselves are learning of this fact.
To begin with, you can never enter into the Eternal Purpose, and
take your place as the "called according to His Purpose," except on
a basis and principle of grace. Try and get in on anything else and
see how far you get. That is, you try by struggling to be saved. Put
it in that simple way. Many have worn themselves out to utter
despair in trying to contribute something toward their own
salvation; to get salvation, by something that they could do. The
Lord has stood aside all the time until everyone has come to see
that they have nothing in themselves whatever that can get them
through. You start there. You struggle to come up to this and that.
Have you ever said, "Well, I must be better before I can come to the
Lord." "I have to make this adjustment and that adjustment before I
can be a Christian." "There are certain things that I can see will
have to be given up before I can give myself to the Lord." You know
the common talk, and yet how mistaken all that! Some have even
thought that they could pray themselves through into salvation, or
shed enough tears to get through. It is not either tears of
repentance, or prayers, but the Blood that avails for the soul, and
the explanation of the earliest spiritual experiences of a penitent
is found in this principle that it is not their penitence which is
of avail, whatever form it may take, it is the grace of God and that
alone. If, beloved, for one moment in all eternity any man, or any
woman could lay their salvation to the account of their own strength
of will, their own power to break with evil habits, their own
persistence, it would entirely upset the whole system of grace, and
throw into confusion the whole case for salvation, because there are
multitudes who, in themselves, have not persistence, or strength of
will, or determination at all, and therefore they must go to the
wall, and it is a case of the survival of the fittest. That is not
salvation. That is not the system of grace.
God takes the strong and the weak on the same footing, and He says
right at the beginning that this Eternal Purpose can only be entered
into on a basis and principle of grace, and from that moment onward
it is all of grace. The sustenance of your spiritual life, beloved,
is not upon the basis of your exhaustive study and apprehension of
the Word of God as such. There are some people who have the most
comprehensive and marvellous grip of the scriptures who are the
leanest souls in creation when you come to real spiritual body. They
are as thin as rakes, and yet they have a marvellous knowledge of
the book. Now that does not mean - of course you will not
misunderstand - that there is no place for the study of the Word of
God, as I should be a denial of my own theory if I were saying that,
because I do believe, as much as anybody does in plunging deeply
into the Word, but you understand that is not the basis of my
spiritual growth. It may be an instrument of grace. But what is the
basis, the law of my spiritual sustenance and growth? It is the same
law as my initial entering into, the Eternal Purpose. "I AM," all
the way through. It is the "I AM, the Bread of Life." "I am come
down from heaven for the Life of the world." It is grace all the
time, by which Christ imparts Himself in some mystic way to my
spiritual nourishing and upbuilding. It is the Lord Jesus being
imparted to me.
Now you have come back to "THAT I MAY KNOW HIM." But how are you
going to know Him? You are going to know Him on the principle of
Life which is the free gift of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. The
Life Bread given by Christ continuously imparted. Oh, how the enemy
assails, how he afflicts and tortures on this matter of accusation
and condemnation! It certainly is not a matter of passivity, or
fatalism, it is a matter in spirit of strongly looking toward the
Lord, and in spirit strongly drawing upon the Lord by faith. But,
beloved, it is the Lord freely, in Christ, imparting Himself all the
time. Hurl that back at the enemy every time he accuses you and robs
you of your spiritual vitality by telling you that because you have
done so and so, or failed to do so and so you are going to lose your
salvation. One has met that continually from the enemy, and one has
learned that this is the law: "If I have made a mistake, I deeply
and terribly grieve - I would not consciously make a mistake that
would injure You. I would rather die. Take me out rather than I
should in any way fail You consciously or persistently. Now I take
the precious Blood as over against my failure, believing Your grace
to forgive." Thus you cut the ground from under the feet of the
devil. He has no ground for accusation. You have got to believe in
this whole thing as being a matter of grace, and it is not upon a
matter of my faultlessness; it is His grace. It does not give me
licence to go on as I like, to be careless, but it does call upon me
to believe strongly in His grace. Grace that will flow as He knows
my heart is right toward Him, and I would not wilfully or
consciously blunder and fail, and every time there is any suggestion
that I do so, I simply tell Him of my grief, and that I do believe
in His grace to cover all my sins.
Then, not only in spiritual sustenance and growth, but in spiritual
service it is all of grace. Here we learn many lessons and not least
among them is that we cannot take anything for granted in ministry.
Because the Lord used us on one occasion we cannot take it for
granted that that will be repeated and proceed upon this assumption.
It is not because of some position that we hold, or some programme
to which we have been committed, or some expectation from us, or
some preparation that we have made. We cannot programise the Holy
Spirit, or commit God to our system.
Reputation, position, prestige, commitments, or any human ground
whatsoever which is thought or assumed to be a reason why the Lord
should come in and stand by is of no account to Him. He will shatter
and shame and confound if we fail to recognise that it is all of
grace. Oh, the perils to any
spiritual ministry when the man
is in view; when people take hold of the man and circle round him.
That we are nothing and have nothing, and depend upon the Lord for
every breath, every step, every word, every resource, is a fact
which the Lord will take infinite pains to establish if a truly
spiritual and Divine ministry is to be fulfilled.
Now, He stood upon that law Himself, and showed that as
Representative Man, even in the service of God. He was truly
dependent upon God for every word that He spoke. "The words that I
speak I speak not out from Myself!" And if God ceased to be
gracious, well, that was an end of divine ministry. He might go on
as a popular leader, and have a great future as an eloquent
preacher, but that would all be a horrible deception, and the real
thing not there. "The works that I do I do not out from Myself." "I
am truly dependent upon God being gracious to work through Me every
work." There are people who seem to think that because you have a
testimony you are an expert on certain lines of spiritual work, and
they look to you as such experts, as if you had set up a spiritual
surgery. But no such ministry can be taken for granted, every single
case is by itself and rests upon a specific act of Divine Grace.
Now you see that law of grace as the principle which governs all
spiritual experience. Why does the Lord empty us? Why does the Lord
constantly pour us out, keep us at an end? Why is it that one of His
chosen methods is to bring us to weakness, to emptiness, and to keep
us there? Because it is all of grace, and grace was the principle
that made Him empty Himself. "Ye know the
grace of our Lord
Jesus Who though He was rich, for our sakes became poor." Though He
possessed all things He emptied Himself. That is the grace of the
Lord Jesus. And He set the standard and initiated the law of all
spiritual service, which is the emptying of ourselves that God might
do the thing Himself, and do it through an instrument, and everybody
would say, "now if you knew the truth about that man or that woman
you would never for a moment suggest that it was out of themselves
that they did it, you would know that it was the grace of God that
was doing it." It is the explanation of His method with us in His
spiritual works. Why He shatters, empties, gets us down to the end,
and why He all the time gives us nothing beyond the present moment,
so that we have to come again for the next time, and start all over
afresh with Him as it were. Why He keeps us on short commons in
ministry so that sometimes it is true we do not know how we are
coming to this ministry, and we come to the conclusion that we have
nothing whatever to give, and then, in His grace He rises up and
brings something through. And the same thing has got to be done
again before there can be any more ministry. Self-sufficiency,
self-confidence is the antithesis of the law of grace. Grace then is
the law.
Now the whole of the Eternal Purpose is not going to be realised
because we see, because we have a wonderful comprehension of that
Purpose. No. Thank God for the revelation, but to make that
revelation real, and to bring through the Eternal Purpose - Oh, He
can do it, and He will do it, in His sovereignty He will accomplish
it. To be of any use in its realisation, we shall come in to that
sovereign Purpose and abide in it only on a principle of grace. Just
as the initiation and the continuation is by grace, so the
consummation will be by grace. The problem of how it is going to be
done arises in the natural world. The cry in the natural world is,
"How can a man be born again?" There is no resource on the natural
side for that, it is all of grace: and as to a man's continuation in
spiritual life and strength - "How can this man give us His flesh to
eat?" There is no explanation on the natural side at all, but the
answer is, He does it by His grace. When we come to the consummation
there is still a problem on the natural side - "How are the dead
raised up?" There is no explanation and no resource on the natural
side, but He will do it by His grace. "He will raise us up at the
last day." The explanation is in grace. That is the two-fold law all
the way through - Jesus Christ as Lord, in the Eternal Purpose of
God realising that Purpose through "the things which are not," and
that is grace.