Editor's Letters

by T. Austin-Sparks

November 1928

Beloved of the Lord,

It will be patent to you from the contents of the paper that for some time past the Lord has been stressing amongst us the matter of His triumphant Life. We have been made - not only to see - but to recognise and know that that Life, which in Himself has proved triumphant in every realm, and which He has given us to share, is the only, but the sure basis of our victorious progress and effectual testimony. It has become the explanation of all the deep and dark experiences through which we are taken; when at times it has seemed that hell itself was given some leash to wrap us around. He Who has bruised Satan under His own heel is going to give the Church - His Body - the counterpart of that and "God shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly." This bruising is in the power of a life which cannot be holden of the pangs of death. It is the basis of every Divine activity in and through the Church. These activities are undoubtedly the making actual in the "Body of Christ" all that has been made actual in the "Head." Can we get the range of that?

But He must have an adequate basis, and the order of this ever increasing basis of His achievement is life, light, faith, obedience, deeper death, more life. There is a cycle of ever-expanding dimensions until at length every limit will be transcended. Our prayer must be for more and more life, and a confidence in the wisdom of the process by which the prayer is answered, even if it seems like death.

We greet you in the Lord's name, and would remind you that you - our readers in all the world - are upon our hearts, and that we pray for you continually. We are constantly besieged by many who are anxious that we should accept this or that line of teaching, system of truth, "fuller light," etc., but we would like our friends to know that it is not merely upon a basis of the right or the wrong, the truth or the error of such that we do not respond - though in many cases this exists - but because we see clearly our calling and know that ministry to the whole Body of Christ with which we are charged, and we cannot be turned aside on to what would be merely departmental and phasial.

The testimony of Jesus is that of His Life triumphant in resurrection, and everything has to be tested by this; not a matter of fascination, sensation, interest, apparent solution of mental perplexities, but whether it is Life, mighty, liberating, with an impact upon darkness, desolation, and death. And Jesus is that Life.

Then let us make all our quest to be - "That I may know HIM."

Yours in that testimony,

T. Austin-Sparks.
T. Madoc-Jeffreys.