"One New Man"

by T. Austin-Sparks

Chapter 2 - Putting on the New Man

"...And have put on the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of Him that created him" (Col. 3:10).

"For as many of you as were baptized into Christ did put on Christ" (Gal. 3:27).

"... that He might create in Himself of the two one new man... one body through the cross" (Eph. 2:15,16).

"Put on the new man, that after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth" (Eph. 4:24).

"And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father" (Gal. 4:6).

"For in one Spirit were we all baptized into one body... and were... all made to drink of one Spirit" (1 Cor. 12:13).

The word which is on my heart is not an easy one to express, and we shall need to be prayerfully looking to the Lord for enablement to apprehend what He desires we should know at this time.

In our previous meditation, we were speaking about the two sides of the great revelation which has come in the New Testament, the great revelation of Christ. On the one side as to Himself and the significance of His own Person, on the other side as to His corporate Self and the significance of His Body, the church. And the passages which we have read make it quite clear that Christ is the new Man who is put on, but that that new Man is something into which the church is formed - "of the two one new man". These are not two, separate; Christ a new Man, and the church a new man. They are brought together. Christ is put on as the new Man and as He is put on, all those who have put on Christ, the new Man, are formed into this corporate expression of Christ. Not that He loses His separate personality or individuality in the church, but the church is brought into that vital corporate relationship, oneness, with Him so that He and His members - He as Head and all His members as the Body - form one entity, one new Man. I think we know that; it is perfectly obvious.

But I want now to get down to something of the simple practical meaning of this as it affects us individually and collectively, for I have followed on with these other two passages - "the Spirit of His Son into our hearts", that is the one side; then the other side - "all baptized in... one Spirit". That phrase, "one Spirit", implies the corporate nature of things: "the Spirit of His Son" speaks of the personal, and independent or separate expression of Christ.

Now, we were saying in our previous meditation that in this new Man, Christ, God has introduced into this universe a new order of man. Christ is the first and the type of a new order. The Holy Spirit has come to generate a new family after that unique order of Christ, that distinct and different kind that God has introduced. And it is just the practical meaning of that which is of such importance and account to us. Everything will depend upon our recognition and apprehension of that as to what kind of people we are going to be as Christians, whether we are just going to be Christians in the sense of members of the Christian religion, accepting and believing certain truths and doctrines, or whether we are going to be children of God and become sons of God. There is all the difference between those two things, between belonging to Christianity and being children of God.

A New Constitution

This putting on of the new Man which speaks of our personal individual changing over from the realm and order of nature in Adam, to that altogether different and new realm and order of Christ, is something very radical as to our constitution. It really does mean that something has been introduced into our very being which was not there before, which is not only something new as to its nature, but which is a Person with all the faculties and all the functions of a living Person of a different order.

Christ as that new Man belonging to that new and different order of being, is constituted according to the mind of God, the thoughts of God, "after God", an altogether heavenly Divine order. And while it may sound like a platitude, or while we may be able to agree and understand it to a certain extent, it really does take a whole lifetime, no matter how long that life may be, if we started this thing as soon as we had any intelligence to be able to accept Christ personally and individually, if it commenced then and went right on and we lived our full tenure of years, it takes a full life, a whole life, for us to learn. And even then we have not fully learned the utter difference between the mentality of God and the mentality of man; between God's thoughts and man's thoughts, God's ways and man's ways, how God views things, judges things, estimates things, does things, as being so completely different from the ways and the ideas, the mentality and the conception of the Adam race.

The fact is that these are two worlds apart and there is no bridging these worlds. That is the meaning of the Cross. "As many of you as were baptized into Christ did put on Christ", and baptism means a death, a burial and a resurrection; the utter end, as in a complete death of an order, the burying of that order out of sight, right away, and another order brought in in resurrection.

And the new Man order is of another, not the Adam, and it takes all the years that we have of this life to learn how different those orders are. It is one of the features and characteristics of a true spiritual history that the child of God is learning how different the Lord is from what he or she is, and being changed, conformed, transformed, and that means a lot of letting go, a continual letting go. It means that we have continually, again and again through our lives, to say a fresh "Yes" to our baptism, confirm our baptism. That is, God meant in our baptism that we died, we went out, and we have got to say: "Yes, I went out and that went out and another thing. Yes, God meant that and I must let that go out", and all the way along we are compelled on the one hand to be letting go that which God meant was put away in the death of His Son. And on the other hand accepting something altogether foreign to us, accepting something which a little while ago we would never have accepted, never for a moment would we have entertained that. If it had been put to us at a certain point in our spiritual growth, we would not have considered it for a moment, but the Lord has been doing something and we are ready to accept that which we would not a little while ago.

If we are going on with the Lord, we are going to come to a hundred and one things which today we would not have considered at any price; we are going to marvel at ourselves. If you had told me a few years ago I would have done that, I would not have believed you, I would have said, "Never!" Here I am doing the thing that I would never have thought of at one time. That is the course of a true spiritual history. That is putting on the new Man and the other Man from ourselves.

The Renewing of the Mind

How is that done, by what means, on what basis? Well, the Word says, "by the renewing of your mind" (Rom. 12:2), that we "should walk in newness of life" (Rom. 6:4), "serve in newness of spirit" (Rom. 7:6). What is the renewing of the mind? Well, it is the new Man mind, that is all; a new mind coming in taking the place of the old. That is where the battles take place very often.

We have a mind of our own, we have a judgment of our own, we have a reason of our own, and you can see Christian people so often held up by their own mind, locked up by their own judgment. They are going to think this thing through, they are going to work this thing out in their mind, and they think they will get somewhere along that line, in that way, by that means.

What we were saying in our previous meditation was that everything in relation to the new order of God is by revelation of the Holy Spirit. Paul would never have got himself through to Christianity by reasoning it out. All his reason was the other way, "I verily thought that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus" (Acts 26:9). I thought that I ought. Well, when a man is there, what are you going to do with him? His religion, his very relationship to God, his conscience (for conscience only carries us as far as our enlightenment, conscience is the witness to our knowledge, and when you get your new knowledge, your conscience will rise to it) when it is a matter of conscience, "I verily thought that I ought", there is no hope for that man along the line of reason. You cannot reason with him. See how far you will get with him when he thinks that he ought! That man needs a revelation, the renewing of the mind, another mind, a new mind.

Now, that is the point. This is the very inheritance, the very heritage, the very prerogative, the very position of a child of God. If only the Lord could get this into you, it will be enough. John puts it this way, "The anointing which ye have received of Him abideth in you, and ye need not that any one teach you; but... His anointing teacheth you concerning all things" (1 John 2:27). Now, be careful how you apply that, because John was not saying that you become a law unto yourself and knowledge begins and ends with you and you have no need therefore for anybody to help you or to instruct or to teach you. He is not saying that generally. Do not forget he has a context and the context helps us in this connection. He is speaking about "antichrists many" and he says in connection with many antichrists, which are already abroad, "the anointing which is in you teacheth you".

The question is, how am I to know what is Christ and what is antichrist, when antichrists are imitations of Christ, simulating Christ, angels of light? How am I to know, so as to be delivered from the deception of antichrists with their wonderful wisdom, with their similarity of language to the New Testament, with their supernatural powers, their working of miracles? How am I to know when they come along like Christ in word and in deed? The anointing which is in you teaches you. You do not need that anybody teach you this and say, "That is antichrist". You know. Because we are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts.

And I do want to say to you, especially to the younger Christians, that this is the nature of a child of God, of a true Christian. It is not that you have come into a system of teaching or order of practice, a form of words or rites or ordinances and so on. It is that there is in you a new living Person with all His faculties alive and He tells you, He teaches you, He holds you. You know what is the Lord and what is not the Lord, what is Life and what is death. You are able, not because of your faculties, but because of this new Man, the other Man, and what your judgment would decide upon, this other Man will not accept. You sometimes would, in your best religious judgment, decide along a certain line, but the Man inside says, "No", the Lord will not go with you and you know you cannot. Yet the thing seems so right, so proper, so "I ought...".

On the other hand, so often you would not do certain things, your natural judgment is against it, but the new Man is demanding it, is challenging, is calling for that, and here you are, and which are you going to obey?

This is what is needed among the Lord's people. Call it what you will - spiritual discernment, spiritual understanding, spiritual intelligence. It is a new and other Man within, bringing in a new and different order of things, and that is what is meant by putting on Christ. And that will make Christianity a living thing, a fresh thing, because there is no end to that. It will take you a lifetime, and I do not know how long beyond this life, it seems to me it will take all eternity for me to learn Christ. For I do not think we are coming to stagnation afterwards, but then with capacities freed from the incapacitation of this mortal life, we shall learn and go on learning, "of the increase of His kingdom (government) there shall be no end" (Isa. 9:7). But here we are dealing with this life, and what is needed is that every Christian, every child of God, should know this: that He has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into their heart and that the Spirit of His Son is not less than Christ Himself. It is a new Man and you are learning, and it is wonderful.

Be careful then, about this conflict, this clash of the old man with the new. Remember that it is a matter of subjecting our minds to the Lord, letting go our judgments to the Lord. We will, sooner or later, if we are going on, have to come to the place where we say, "I cannot get through this thing by thinking it out; I cannot reason myself into this new position that I am seeking, I cannot get anywhere. I have thought and worried, I have laid awake many hours trying to see through. I simply give up my own mental struggle over this and say, 'Lord, give me Your mind about this. I let my mind go; Lord, I by faith accept Your mind.'" Then you are simply putting on the new Man, and that is the way through. That is true; many of you know that is true.

Some of us know it after many years of very bitter struggle to get through to some new place. We do not get through until we have crashed before our Lord and made our minds subject to His thoughts. You see, antichrist, when fully-fledged, is simply going to be the superman mind taking the place of God, the mind of God. You can see it at work in the world today: the spirit of antichrist with another mentality which is supplanting the mind of God, and it is imposed with terrific psychic force on the world. God is not going to have one fragment or shadow of the superman, the antichrist, that is the worship of man, the bowing down to man. God will break that and grind it to powder and scatter it upon the deep, unto the four winds of heaven. That man is dead with God in the Cross of Christ. He is not going to have us come in with our powers of reasoning.

You say, "Well, where does the human faculty of mind or reason come in?" It is a vehicle for transmitting what has come. My human mind is becoming a vehicle of something that the Lord has shown, and that is the value of it. But it did not produce this, it did not work this out, it did not originate in the human mind. It was something the Lord showed and then used the human mind for transmission. That is the value of it. It is a channel, not a spring of Divine revelation.

Well now, that is one side. That is to be true individually of us. He has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts. That is the personal thing and we are to know the Lord individually in that way and ever-increasingly, going on to know, with that kind of inward knowledge increasing.

The New Man Corporate

But then the Lord has another side, which is a very helpful, valuable side. It is a great safeguard. It is the corporate side of this very thing. The Spirit of God has not only been planted into the individual child of God, but now it says, "In one Spirit were we all baptized into one body", and we said that one Spirit means corporate. Neither Jew nor Greek; "of the two one new man". The Holy Spirit has not so many spirits as there are members of the body, but one Spirit. The value here is that we recognise that the Holy Spirit, while resident within us individually as members of the Body of Christ, is resident in us as members of the Body of Christ in a related way, and the values of this are tremendous.

The Mind of the Spirit in the New Man

First of all, there is the value of corroboration. If, for example, here are two or three members of the Body, baptized in one Spirit into one Body, and the Holy Spirit is free, unhindered in those members, and there is a matter which concerns the Lord, then as those members get together before the Lord, the one Spirit will say the same thing in the several members. That is what happened in the New Testament; it was true then. The one Spirit will corroborate. We shall find that we have one mind about matters, we are coming to one conclusion, and this is not by discussing, not by threshing it out, but by prayer, by waiting on the Lord.

This is the principle behind things in the New Testament for progress. It was a great step forward when at Antioch the Holy Spirit said, "Separate Me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them" (Acts 13:2). That was a big development in the New Testament, in the things of the dispensation, but how did it come about? There were in the church which was at Antioch certain brethren named. Here is a group; they ministered to the Lord and fasted, and the Holy Spirit spoke, not to one, but to all. They were waiting on the Lord, and this group of responsible men in that church at Antioch all received the same leading from the Lord. That is a fruitful way. It proved tremendously fruitful and I am quite sure that it must have meant a great deal to Barnabas and Paul that all those brethren had got the mind of the Spirit about them, that the Holy Spirit had spoken the same thing to so many. They were not just going forward on that great mission because one man said they ought to, but the church, represented by its elders, had said it. There is strength, safety, in that. I only say that by way of indicating this principle, that there is the corporate side of the Spirit by which there is corroboration, there is protection.

Subjection in the Body

And that makes necessary not only the individual subjection to the Lord, but the individual subjection in the Body of Christ, the individual subjection in the fellowship of the saints. If one man or one woman in an assembly of God's people takes an independent position, even on this matter of knowing the mind of the Lord and flouting the judgment of his or her brethren, they are laying themselves open to error and deception. That is a strong statement but it is true and has proved true again and again. The Spirit of the Lord does not move that way. He is not the Spirit alone of the individual; He is the Spirit of the one Body. And while He calls for the individual to be subject to the Spirit, He calls for the individual to be subject to the saints. "Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God" (Eph. 5:21). That is the statement. That is safety, that is fruitfulness. There is nothing about that that causes loss. People hate that word 'subjection' because they think it means loss to them, they are going to be tied up and unable to move. Don't you believe it. It is the way of release, enlargement, the way of the Spirit.

Peter had to learn that lesson and I believe Peter became the very embodiment of this principle in the New Testament, for Peter, while he was a disciple, was always taking an independent line. "Thou shalt never wash my feet" (John 13:8). "This shall never be unto Thee, Lord" (Matt. 16:22). "I will not deny Thee" (Matt. 26:35). That is the man taking an independent line; very devoted to the Lord, always with the Lord's interests in view, but independent. And he came to a crash, an awful crash, and after that it is Peter who says, "All of you be subject one to another" (1 Pet. 5:5). He had to learn it through a deep and terrible experience. Oh, he did not learn it all at once! At Caesarea it is still, "Not so, Lord"; but the Lord comes in and says, "What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common" (Acts 10:15). Now then, Peter, this subjection business again! And he let go. Was it loss, was it bondage, was it limitation? Oh, it was enlargement for Peter and for the Lord. He gained a great experience along that line.

So you see the Spirit of the new Man, meaning on the one hand a new intelligence, a new understanding, a new capacity. We are constituted a people with an entirely new and different faculty of understanding. Oh, do not let that go. I do want to see our young Christians especially moving in this way, that they are not a part of a system, not a part of anything outward in the matter of teaching, but they are knowing, they are able to say, "The Lord has shown me, I have come to see, the Lord has taught me this, I know the Lord in this matter." Oh, do ask the Lord to constitute you like that.

But then remember that it is not going to make you an independent freelance law-unto-yourself-before-the-Lord Christian! There is the other side to that truth, "In one Spirit were we all baptized into one body", and you have to bring what is personal for the corroboration of others who have the Spirit. You have to bring what is between you and the Lord, and submit it to the witness of the Spirit. "In the mouth of two or three witnesses" (Matt. 18:16). That is your safeguard and you need not fear; if they are truly spiritual people, if they are those who have the Spirit and are taught of the Spirit, you will only receive help, not hindrance, and you may take it that any true spiritual man or woman will never turn upon you and say you are all wrong. If they are truly spiritual, they will say, even if not seeing for the moment what you are feeling, "I do not see it just at the moment; I will go to the Lord and wait upon the Lord and when the Lord shows me, then I will tell you." That is spirituality. It is not domination.

Do remember that first of all it is altogether new, a new Man. That new Man has got to become a personal reality in each individual member; new, different, other, living in each individual member. In a sense, each individual member of Christ has got to be as though there were no others in all this world who know the Lord; that is, that you know Him so that if you were planted where no other Christian was, you know the Lord. "My sheep hear My voice" (John 10:27). You know His voice, inwardly you have a knowledge of Him, a walk with Him, intelligence. You have not got to rush somewhere, wait for the next boat or send a letter to somebody to get the mind of the Lord; you have the root of the matter in yourself. May God make you like this from the beginning.

Then remember that this new Man is corporate and as the Spirit and the new Man are individual, so the Spirit and the new Man are corporate, and these go together. You cannot separate them; you have to recognise that relatedness is a governing law of progress. No member of our body can develop by itself. It depends upon all the other parts of our body for its life, its development. And so, in the Body of Christ there is interrelatedness and interdependence of all faculties and all functions to build up the Body and make increase, and we have to come and subject ourselves among the Lord's people and walk as a part of a whole, not in any detached and unrelated way. I will leave it there; the Lord make all He can of this word.