"One New Man"

by T. Austin-Sparks

Chapter 3 - The Unity of the One New Man

Reading: 2 Chron. 30; Psalm 133.

"But ye are come unto mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable hosts of angels" Heb. 12:22.

The Blessing of Life

Reverting to Psalm 133 which stands at the centre of these two passages - 2 Chronicles 30 and Hebrews 12 - we are given very clearly to see the way of the greatest blessing. If we ask what the greatest blessing is, it is the blessing: "There the Lord commanded the blessing." The greatest blessing that the Lord can give is Life evermore, is that Life peculiar to Himself, His own unique gift, Life for evermore. Everything that we could desire and everything that we need is found in that Life. The blessing is in Zion, and when you look, you find that there are three Psalms here about Zion: 132, 133 and 134, just a little group of psalms about Zion particularly.

In Psalm 132 it is fulness in Zion. "The Lord hath chosen Zion; He hath desired it for His habitation. This is My resting-place for ever. Here will I dwell; for I have desired it. I will abundantly bless her provision: I will satisfy her poor with bread" (v. 13-15). There is fulness in Zion.

Then the next psalm, the one we have just read about Zion, is the blessing for Zion. Fulness is to be found in Zion and the Lord makes Zion the object of His blessing, "There the Lord commanded the blessing." It is what is in Zion, and then what is from the Lord for Zion.

Then Psalm 134: "The Lord bless thee out of Zion" (v.3); then it is what goes through Zion.

In that threefold thought about Zion you have everything that you desire or want. Fulness is in Zion, the Lord towards you in blessing in Zion, and the Lord through you to others, making Zion a channel of blessing. "The Lord bless you out of Zion." What more do we want than that? If we really stood in the good of that, we have everything. We have fulness, we have the Lord towards us in blessing and we have the vocation of being a vehicle of blessing beyond, all around. "The Lord bless you out of Zion."

And all that is bound up with this special blessing - Life. The fulness is in the Life and the Life is the fulness. The blessing is the Life and there is no greater, and we want no other. And the ministry out to others is the Life. That is the Lord's thought for Zion.

Well, let us not hurry past that. Here is the thought of God in a threefold way for what is called Zion: fulness, satisfaction - "I will satisfy." You have come to the place where you have found what you are after, what you want, what you need. You are able to say, "I have looked long, searched far; I have now found, I have come into that which is unmistakably the greatest blessing the Lord can give. I know the blessing of Life, His Life, and more, I now know what it means to be a channel of Life in the Lord's hands, I have come into the blessing of being a means of ministering Life to others!"

I am sure we all covet this threefold desire and thought of the Lord. That is the blessing.

The Way of the Blessing

But what is the way of the blessing? Well, it is here again - love is the way of the blessing. "How good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!" "There the Lord commanded the blessing, even life." That wonderful story in 2 Chronicles thrills our hearts. I do not know how it affects you; it makes me feel I want to go and take the Albert Hall in London and call all the children of God together for a great celebration of the love of God! It makes you feel, "Oh, that we could have something like that today where people leave their own things, their own places, their own interests and gravitate towards that centre of the love of God, the Passover, the Cross of our Lord Jesus! Meeting there, all contrary things being flung into the brook Kidron, a great celebration of the love of God among His people." Our hearts go out for that. The way of Life is love; it is Life through love.

When they came thus to Jerusalem, and you must remember that it was a tremendous thing that happened, for the kingdom was divided and very strongly divided, Israel and Judah split asunder, but they came; a great assembly came out of them. The division was overridden or set aside at this moment. The Passover dismissed all that; it was a wonderful bridging of a terrible national rift. They came together in Jerusalem in the spirit of Psalm 133, and there are many who think that Hezekiah used this psalm on that occasion and was inspired by this psalm in what they did. However that may be, there is no doubt about it that it is a very living expression of the psalm, "Behold, how good...". If we had looked upon that scene that day we should have said, "Behold, how good, how pleasant! After all this strain, conflict, division and estrangement, how good, how rare, how precious, to see brethren dwelling together in unity, and what an atmosphere of joy, of Life!" They had seven days and they said, "It is so good - let us repeat it, let us go on," and they had another seven days. There is Life and that Life came through love.

Well, "ye are come to Zion" - this is not something historic, something beyond, not something in the past; nor is it something in the future towards which we are marching as an objective; we "are come". That is, the Lord's people are regarded as already being Zion. The church is looked upon from above as Zion. "Ye are come to Zion... to the church of the firstborn" (v. 22-23). God's conception of His church is Zion. The trouble is that we are not what we are.

We want, for ourselves and for all the Lord's people, fulness. We want more and more, in our own case and for multitudes of others of the Lord's children, that it shall be that way, and they are able to say, "I have come into that which answers to my deepest need, satisfies my heart's longing. I have found I am in the realm where everything is great, full, wonderful, too big for me!" Are you there? That is what the Lord wants, where we, for ourselves and for the Lord's people, know the blessing of Life, for it is a Life, and I do covet this for all the Lord's people and every child of God.

We do not want companies of the Lord's people who are characterised in the first place by certain kinds of teaching and interpretation and truth. What we desire more than anything is that coming together, it shall be Life; we go away feeling that we are alive again and living anew; that all that come in among us shall see and feel first of all the power of that Life. Whether they understand what is said or not, whether they are able to grasp what is presented or not, they have to say, "But you meet the Lord there in terms of Life, there is no doubt about it, it is the testimony of Life that is there!" Surely we covet that; and so for the ministry out from Zion, streams of Life, "The Lord bless you out of Zion" our hearts say, 'Lord, make this good in our case in every one of these three senses, and make us really to be Zion in that threefold way'.

How then? Well, Life, as we have said, is by the way of love; not firstly by the way of truth but by the way of love. It is always so in the Lord's Word. Another translation of the last clause of Psalm 133 is: "In this fellowship has the Eternal fixed the blessing of endless life." This fellowship of love is Life. For us here, that must be both a general and a particular word of exhortation and of discrimination. We need and must have an enlargement of heart for all the people of God. We must have that continually. It is the way of Life; not just love for those who agree with us or see as we see, but for all the people of God.

We must have love free from judgment, criticism, anything in the direction of isolation, separateness, exclusiveness; an openness of heart and a largeness of love for all the Lord's people. I am certain that anything less than that is going to work against this threefold meaning of the Lord. It is going to mean less in the matter of divine fulness than the Lord would have. It is going to mean less in the absolute and perfect blessing of Life, and it is going to mean less in the ministry - the outgoing, the blessing, out of Zion. That is, it is going to be death in a greater degree than the Lord would have it; Life less than the Lord would have.

If I may say this word here, being here in this place, may I urge upon you and beseech you to be very careful of your phraseology lest it convey an altogether wrong impression. I hear people speaking of, and I so often get letters in which the phrase occurs, "the Honor Oak Fellowship". Do you use that phrase? I am going to ask you to revise your mentality about that entirely. The "Honor Oak Fellowship"; God forbid! When we spoke of a fellowship and conference centre, we never for one instant thought of a particular fellowship, an "Honor Oak Fellowship". There may be a Keswick Fellowship, that is, a fellowship of all those who go to and are interested in and connected with that Fellowship; quite all right, I am not saying it is wrong. There is a Dohnavur Fellowship; quite rightly, nothing wrong about that; a fellowship of all those who are interested in and concerned for that work. But there is no such thing as an Honor Oak Fellowship in that sense, a fellowship of people who are interested in Honor Oak and what goes on here and goes out from here; never! God forbid! The only thought for that word being used here was that it should be a place for the fellowship of all the Lord's people, no matter what their connection, their association; if they are the Lord's, that we should be in fellowship and have fellowship and that this should be a place where that fellowship might be expressed. So I beseech you to get rid of a false idea if it is there, and never use phraseology like that which conveys a wrong impression. This is only a part of the whole.

I am certain that, unless we have a heart enlarged towards all the Lord's people wherever they are, in whatever stage of spiritual development they may be, we are going to forfeit something of what the Lord would have in this matter of Life in fulness, Life as the blessing, and Life as the ministration. Oh yes, by love the Life will be shown, but that leaves one other word to be said.

The Cross the Basis of Love

What is this love? What is the basis of this love? Well, with Hezekiah it was the Passover. The love springs out of, takes its rise from, the Cross of our Lord Jesus.

It is not just a large-hearted generosity or magnanimity. That is a dangerous thing. That will leave loopholes for many things that will be destructive and harmful, a kind of magnanimity that overlooks things which should never be overlooked. The Cross of the Lord Jesus never overlooks sin; it is the strongest witness against sin. Oh no, it is this love which springs from a true apprehension of the meaning of Christ giving Himself for us, for our sins. It is a love purified by His precious Blood, purified of self, of sin; it is a holy love.

I think we understand that, above all other things, the Cross of our Lord Jesus is a witness to the love of God. That is what it is meant to be. It is there in that Cross that the love of God is shown as nowhere else and in no other way. A people who make much of the Cross ought to be a people about whom much of the love of God is found.

Oh, for a great celebration of that love in our hearts that we might find our hearts enlarged and that from this time there shall be a much greater love for all saints than there has been, a real enlargement, a real embracing of all the Lord's people, a gathering into our hearts. The Lord command the blessing through love, of Life for evermore.