The Opened Heaven
by T. Austin-Sparks
Chapter 6 - Out of Death Into Life
Reading: John 5:21,24-26.
"We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not abideth in death" (1 John 3:14).
"Out of death into life".
Without going back over the earlier meditations to take up what the Lord has been saying to us, we shall find ourselves moving in that whole realm again in this chapter as we go forward. We shall be occupied with the matter of Life.
Now, the feature which distinguishes the child of God from all others, is that they have Life. In the same sense that is not true of any other creature on this earth. The child of God alone possesses Life, and it is that which distinguishes them and separates them from all others, and it is that which makes them what they are, and which constitutes for them the character of their experience, and round which everything for them revolves. I mean that that fact is the very occasion of all the divine dealings with them, and of all the satanic operations against them. It is that which is the basis of all the Lord's interest in them, that the Life which they received in becoming children of God, born from above, shall be developed to its fullest and reach its consummation. That is the basis of all the Lord's procedure with a child of God. To seek to limit, paralyse, quench that Life, to shut it down and to circumvent its ultimate issue, is the persistent object of the Adversary. So that the very fact that the child of God possesses Life in this specific sense, is the thing which constitutes the child of God a being differing from all others and distinguishes such from all the rest of the creation.
I want just to reiterate a little word which we were mentioning in chapter four in order that we might keep closer to this matter. We were pointing out then that there are many statements concerning the raising of the Lord Jesus from the dead, and that very often the mental grasp or apprehension of those statements is such as to make it mean alone that the Lord Jesus was raised from among the departed - from among those who had departed from this life, the deceased - whereas the statement is a much wider, broader statement than that when understood in its fullness. For the literal translation of the words would more frequently be that He was raised "from among" the dead, not just raised from the dead as representing a certain department of humanity which no longer inhabited this earth, but that He was "raised... from among the dead" (Acts 13:34). And that embraces both those who have departed this life and those that are here in this life, for death is regarded as a universal thing outside of Christ, and that the Lord Jesus in resurrection is not only Someone out from among departed ones, whom we commonly call "the dead", but He is Someone out from all the rest of humanity, differing in the sense that He has a Life which even those who are here in this world, who are not deceased, do not possess.
And that leads us on to this point, that we are called here to live in the midst of dead people by a risen Life; that even here and now, with the world around us, a very animate world and a very animate race, we may know death in a very real way; but the Lord has called us to live the Life of the living among the dead, to be here spiritually triumphant over death.
He Himself when on this earth lived by a divine Life in the midst of death. He not only triumphed over death when He died on the cross, but He triumphed over death when He walked on this earth. When He died on the cross, He went behind death and met death in its ultimate issue, the afterward of death. "It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this cometh judgment" (Heb. 9:27), and it was the afterward of death that the Lord Jesus entered into, met, and overcame in His cross. But He had been in contact with death all the way through, living triumphantly over it, although in His cross He destroyed it in its principle and swallowed it up in His death, and destroyed him that had the power, the hold of death, that is, the devil. Overcoming death is not something future for the believer; it is something present.
Resurrection from the dead, beloved, for you and for me in the Lord Jesus, is not something merely that relates to a coming day when we shall have departed from this life and be brought back again. Resurrection from the dead is spiritually a thing which takes place now in the child of God and in the power of that resurrection we are called to live. And there will be no resurrection at all from among the departed unless we have already got resurrection Life operating in us. "The hour cometh, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live" (John 5:25). And that was not confined to raising the departed from their departed state; that was a thing which took place in His own time among men regarded as dead.
What we want to get at is this: the universal feature of all apart from Christ, is death. Death reigns universally apart from Christ. Life reigns in and by Christ and in and by Christ alone. Everything outside of Christ is locked up in death.
Now we come back to our diagram, and we have at the centre of things: man and his kingdom in the kingdom of men; the kingdom of man, the individual man who is a kingdom of three realms: spirit, soul and body.
In the unregenerate man, the man who is not born again from above, the spirit is in death, that is, that central part of him by which he has relationship to God, fellowship with God, understanding of God, communication with God, that is in death: severed from God. To use the words of the apostle: "alienated from the life of God" (Eph. 4:18), put completely out of fellowship, out of oneness with the Life of God.
We speak of an alien as one who does not belong to a certain country in which he sojourns, and to be alienated from the life of God means that we do not belong to that kingdom of God, that kingdom of Life, so that the spirit of the unregenerate man is in death. The death which is in his spirit is operating in his soul, and his soul (comprised of his reason and natural understanding) is darkened and in death and out of fellowship with God in Life and in light, so that he reasons contrary to God. His natural understanding does not function according to God's mind. His ways are far removed from God's ways, his thoughts are far removed from God's thoughts.
His soul not only comprises his reason and natural understanding, but also his desires and affections. They are also infected by this state of alienation from the Life of God and are contrary to God; desires and affections move other than in correspondence with the desires and affections of God. And then, of course, his will, his volition. His power of directing his life is also alienated from the Life of God. [It is] death! So that man, by nature, is totally incapable of doing the will of God. He may want to do the will of God, but his will is locked up in spiritual death, and death reigns over the whole kingdom of man by nature.
The kingdom of man is also wrapped up and encircled by the kingdom of the world. We will not stay again to define our terms as to what we mean by the world. It is not the place, not necessarily the people, but a spiritual system which can only be felt, only be understood by spiritual susceptibility and sensibilities, a thing which you cannot define in words. But the child of God keenly alive to God, knows exactly what it means, what it is, knows the sense of shock and of strain that comes, a spiritual shock; when you go into it you want to get out of it, you feel you want to have a bath because of the world spirit, system, and the way in which the world does things. It is death reigning, and this inner kingdom, and this outer kingdom are all in death because they are both encircled by the kingdom of darkness, which is the kingdom of death, by him that had the hold of death, that is, the devil; and death is poured in and poured through. No one knows it until they are spiritually quickened. You do not know it until something happens in you to make you alive to the fact. The world does not know of this death (or knows very little of it) the world does not know of this darkness, but when awakened, then the thing is more real than any of the tangible things we have to handle. Death reigns universally outside of Christ: in man, in the world, in and from the kingdom of darkness.
I want to stay further for a re-emphasis upon:
The Active and Terrible Nature of Spiritual Death.
This is one of those things which again can never be conveyed to any mind by words. If there are two things which defeat and defy all attempts of language to convey them to other minds, those two things are life and death. They are things which can only be known and felt; they are not things which can be explained by words.
Death is something more than ceasing to have our bodies animated here on the earth. It is something far deeper, and far more terrible than ceasing to be here in this world. It is an awful, terrible, spiritual reality which only those with a sensitive, quickened, made-alive spirit can really understand and appreciate, and it comes to them with the force and impact of an awful horror of darkness. The soul that has often rejected salvation, coming to the end when it is if not absolutely too late, almost too late, and awakened to that fact of eternity, the fact of death, and the fact that they do not have God, with the awakened consciousness of their state, that soul enters into the most awful, terrible anguish and horror of darkness conceivable. Death becomes to them what it is for all: the most awful thing that has ever entered this universe. Those who have had to labour in the dark places of the earth will tell you of this thing. You sense it in their books.
I do not know how many of you have read the book, "Gold Cord" by Miss Amy Carmichael. If you have not read it, read it, and you will sense that thing. You will sense in that book how that awful thing in the background of India holds, grips, and what an awful thing it is. Miss Carmichael tells us of occasions when she came right into touch with that indescribable something, that evil thing: spiritual death. In these dark places of the earth you know the reality if you can never define it in words. It is an awful, evil thing. All you can say is, it is death. It registers itself upon you. The more spiritually sensitive you are, in other words the more you are walking with the Lord and the more you are in the light, the more intense agony and anguish you suffer and the more intolerable that thing becomes.
I have two experiences I look back upon in one connection. During the days of the war, while I was in Rome I visited many of the historic places, and I remember going into St. Peter's, and while I was sensitive enough then spiritually to register something that was dark and evil and that said "death", after being in St. Peter's for half an hour I was glad to get out of it. It was not just natural conditions; it was a spiritual state. But some ten years afterwards (I take comfort that in ten years I had grown a bit spiritually!) I went back into St. Peter's and I was not in there five minutes before I had to get out again; not natural conditions, but a sense of awful death which came upon my mind and spirit and began to operate upon my body so that physically I registered death in that place. So I quickly fled from the place which to me contained a spirit of death.
What do you expect when it is always a dead crucifix Christ, not a risen, reigning, glorified Lord? Much more than that accounts for it. Those who have been to these countries know the reality of spiritual death, and yet we have never touched death in any real, full way, however far may have been our experience. (And some of us have touched death in a way that has sent a shock through our being and have asked the Lord never to let us touch that again. It has taken us weeks to recover, it has scarred us, it has been getting near what the book of Revelation calls the second death.) We have never touched what the Lord Jesus touched, the fulness of that, going into it without God. It is an awful thing to be in death without God and be fully awake to it. God has graciously, in His mercy, protected humanity in this day of grace from that full consciousness, but humanity is not taking the goodness of God to heart along that line. Of course, if humanity were to awake suddenly to its real state it would turn to God wholesale, but God never wants people to turn to Him just to escape death. But He gives us His Word to preach, His truth to proclaim, these great facts to tell forth, and to warn men. And He allows some of His servants to have a taste of these things so that they may come into the place where they say: "Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men" (2 Cor. 5:11), knowing the awful thing men are in for if they do not accept God's way of Life in Christ.
This is all to emphasize the fact that death is universal outside of Christ, and death is some terrible, awful monster; death in reality can never be beautified. But man is blinded, man is imprisoned, and while the mercy of God has not allowed that man should live in the present hell - this is not the day of hell, it is the day of grace - there is also this other side, that it is a part of Satan's supreme strategy to keep man in blindness as to any measure of consciousness of his state: "the god of this age hath blinded the minds of the unbelieving" (2 Cor. 4:4).
Let us gather this up in a few specific things. Death is a spiritual law. It is not only a state of physical inanimation; it is a spiritual law. Next, death at this present time operates through another spiritual law called the flesh.
Do not materialize the flesh now. That phrase 'the flesh' is a spiritual thing, not a physical thing. I will indicate what I mean. You know in the language of [the book of] Romans and elsewhere that the flesh is a spiritual thing, it is a spiritual law, the fleshly mind, the mind of the flesh and so on. And death operates through the flesh. That is its ground of operation, because the flesh is that spiritual state which has been brought about by the fall, therefore by complicity with Satan.
Death encompasses the whole world, but death, evil as it is, may imitate life, may come in the guise of an angel of light, assume the form of life and so deceive, delude, and mislead as to make people think that they have life when they have no Life, that they are in life when they are really in death. Every work of God is imitated by the devil and God's superlative hallmark, which is Life, is also imitated and assimilated by the Evil One, and there is such a thing as false life. It is important to say that in any kind of analysis or summary of this matter. I mean that you can have an elevation which is not a regeneration.
You can have a moral elevation which falls short of a spiritual regeneration and that moral elevation is assimilation, an imitation of Life in regeneration. Let us never think that moral elevation is necessarily regeneration. It may be just the thing which the enemy himself has put in to obstruct God's way of that which is essentially, of all things, being born from above. One of the marks of the blinding work of the devil is that aspect of intellectual religion whose purpose is the social uplift of men and the improvement of society, and the change of human conditions for the better with all its hopes and promises of a new world, a utopia, without the Cross of Christ, without the blood of the Lamb, without being born from above. That is a strategic master-stroke of the devil, and we must be very careful that we are not caught in the devil's false truth about Life. That is a contradiction I know, but you know what I mean.
Now then, we come to Life.
Life in Christ
We have seen that Life is only possible through death, but not through this death that we have been speaking about, for that is universal. We are in that without any voluntary acceptance on our part; we are dead. The full meaning of that awaits the day when it shall have been irrevocably decided whether we accepted Christ or not. That is, the full, awful meaning of our present state in death will only come upon us when we are beyond that day of salvation. It will be decided then for us forever, what death is in its fulness, but we are in it now. It is not a matter of place at all. It may only be a matter of an instant. It is that which gives the urgency to the appeal of salvation.
Man's make-up causes him so often to look ahead and think of death, judgment, and hell as something future at the end of his life. It may be just like that - in a moment, he finds himself out of time and in eternity, and awake to the full meaning of the state in which he has been living. At present he is not alive to his own state. When a soul is convicted of sin by the Holy Spirit, and suddenly made alive to its own spiritual state, hell rages for that soul until it comes through to salvation. We have seen hell, intolerable hell, rage for a day or two in a man's life and he has said: "I cannot stand this much longer, I will break under this; if God does not deliver me, I will be devoured of this awful fire of hell." There is the consciousness of a state that has been there all the time. And the urgency is, that may be anybody's state.
May God put into my heart and your heart more urgency over the Gospel, for death is a reality and it reigns now, but man is not awakened to the reality of his awful state. But it is not through that death that man comes to Life. It is through his acceptance of all that that death consciously meant for the Lord Jesus. The death of Christ is his way out; that the Lord Jesus did anticipate all that second death, that is, death touched without God, death, under judgment, and if He had not been the One that He was, if He had not been the Son of God, He would never have come back, He would have been devoured of the second death.
You, nor I, nor any other creature in this universe could have done what the Lord Jesus did, which was to go into the full conscious meaning of death without God and survive. It took God to do that. Herein is the uniqueness of Christ and His work. How blind and how iniquitous the heart of man is to put the Lord Jesus on a par with any other man who gives up his life for humanity. No man has ever done that; no man has ever gone into hell, which is the full consciousness of the full meaning of death without God, and survived. Only God can do that. God did it in Christ.
How great a thing He has done! How great a thing is our salvation! How marvellous a Christ is ours! If we get a greater conception of our Saviour and of our salvation, we will be bigger Christians. He anticipated the whole thing right up to its last dregs of anguish and awfulness, which the human heart could not stand, but broke, snapped under the strain. He has made a way out for us by His Cross from all that; He has cleft a way open from death universally in every realm, that we might escape, and our possession of Life out of death comes now by our faith apprehension of Christ's death, and by our faith taking our place with Him in faith as having died for us and risen again.
This is old truth, well known, and yet ever to come to us with greater force and wonder; and Life is through death in that sense, not that we have to go into all that in order to be saved, but that we take the fruit of His having gone into it all. In gratitude, in faith, but seeing that that was our state and our destiny - and who could fail to repent if they truly saw that? No wonder that repentance is the first thing in the Gospel. If that truly represents our state by nature, then we must repent, we apprehend His death by faith, and through death we come into Life. Life is through death. Out from our natural condition, our condition of nature in death, out from the death that wraps us round in the spirit of this world, out from it, and out from the death that wraps that and us round in the kingdom of darkness.
Now I come to this stage where we begin to see that satan's work is always to stamp all that he can with death. That is, in effect, to set aside or undo in effect, the work of the Cross of the Lord Jesus. He will do it by any means, so long as he can do it.
It is a terrible indictment and yet it is true, that no matter how enlightened, civilized or theological, everything which in the slightest degree sets aside the Cross and the Blood of the atoning work of the Lord Jesus, is directly from the devil. There is no question about it. It bears the stamp and impress of satan because that Cross, that Blood, speaks of the Lord Jesus' destruction of that thing which is the supreme mark of satan: death.
The final outworking of Calvary is the swallowing up of death, and that was what Calvary was for; to destroy death in every realm, and by destroying death to take the weapon of satan from him, for that is his weapon. He makes war by spiritual death. Now he is out therefore, to set aside the means by which his weapon is destroyed, and that is the Cross, the Blood of the Lord Jesus, and whenever that is minimised, set aside, ridiculed, undervalued, you trace at once the mark of the weapon. Hence it is of supreme value to keep the Cross always in view. You never get far from the truth if you keep Calvary's full meaning before you.
So many of the Lord's dear children, not awake to the full meaning of the Cross, say, "We have got past the cross, we have advanced." God forbid we should ever advance beyond the Cross. You never can in the Holy Spirit. You discover the Cross has a content far, far bigger than all the years of your life here and you will need the content of that Cross right up to the end. May we be saved from speaking lightly of the message of the Cross.
We do not always want to be strumming on one string about our death, but the Cross is a far bigger thing than our death. It is our Life. But I was saying, satan's work is always to stamp with death, and thus if possible, in effect, to undo or set aside the Cross. He will do this along various lines. He started in the first days, as we have seen in the book of the Acts, by open, unveiled opposition, antagonism, stirring up all his resources in hell and on earth, and by that means he hoped to get compromise on the part of the people of God, which would mean for them an easier way. He tried to force them by the sheer agony of their conditions, to repudiate the position which they had taken, to come down from the level which they had taken up and so to turn to the world again, and in compromises, recantations, and a line of less resistance, go back upon their testimony.
He tried it by force and if he were successful in any cases, what happened was a return link with the old satanic system, and of course death, and the testimony of Life set aside and destroyed. He has not altogether forsaken that course of things. He adapts his methods to cases, and there are a good many Christians today who, because of what the world thinks and says, or would think, or say, or do, because of that which they stood to suffer for an uncompromising testimony to their allegiance to Christ, hide their testimony, hide their light, go carefully, and are moderates in the realm of spiritual things. But what did they amount to in the matter of spiritual Life?
The point that we are getting at is this, that just in so far as we in our hearts are in fellowship with that whole realm from which the Cross of the Lord Jesus was intended to deliver us, in that measure spiritual death reigns over us, in that measure the value of the Cross of Christ is curtailed and set aside, in that measure we are deprived of the fulness of the heavenly Life, in that measure we do not know spiritual Life as a mighty energy and power.
Later in the time of the beginnings the enemy pursued his end by seeking to introduce carnal elements among believers. The apostle wrote that: "to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace" (Rom. 8:6, AV). "For the mind of the flesh is death" (Rom. 8:6, RV, ASV) And so the enemy introduces carnal-mindedness among believers and by that link with what Calvary set aside, brought in death.
The first letter to the Corinthians is very largely a letter of spiritual death. Some terrible things are said even in association with the highest spiritual matters. You reach the summit of things in the Lord's table and the pivot of everything is in the Lord's table - the testimony of His death for us, the testimony of our death in Him; the testimony of the one Body, and the one anointing. All the testimonies are gathered up in the Lord's table, and yet in that first letter to the Corinthians the apostle has to speak of carnal elements coming to the Lord's table, with disastrous results. "For this cause many among you are weak and sickly, and not a few sleep" (1 Cor. 11:30). Carnal-mindedness among believers, a strategic thing on the devil's part to bring in death and destroy the work of Christ in His Cross. Are we not feeling the strong call of the Lord to have all the work of Calvary wrought in us? See how important it is that we should be by the Cross crucified to the world and the world to us; that we too should be crucified to the flesh that carnal-mindedness should have no place.
And then later, because these strategies of the enemy did not seem to succeed fully and enough, he started patronizing the church. When the devil patronizes the church, you may be sure that he has got a deep thing in mind. Someone has said, 'You put your foot on the serpent and feel him wriggle and you know it is all right; if you do not feel any wriggle, you are not sure whether he is there or not and you have reason to be alarmed.' But when the enemy ceased wriggling and started patronizing, this was the most perilous time of all for the church. And when Constantine came along and brought about a fellowship with the church and State, and introduced that whole regime by which the church was pulled down from its spiritual and heavenly place, and constituted a thing on the earth to appeal to men, a thing tangible, a thing seen, a material thing instead of a spiritual thing, that was the doom of spirituality. That was a master-stroke of the devil. The world came in like a flood, and from that day to this the enemy has triumphed more against the Cross of the Lord Jesus by that system, by that order, than perhaps along any other line.
He is out to bring in death, and whatever his way may be, it is always by way of compromise. That is, a link with a system, a realm from which Calvary cuts off, from which the Cross of the Lord Jesus severs. Any touch with that realm is death, and the testimony is paralysed and destroyed. That is why the apostle, writing to the Hebrew believers who, having turned to the Lord Jesus, having seen something of the meaning of Christ in glory crowned with glory and honour, having come to see something of Christ exalted, seen that He took up all earthly patterns and types and fulfilled them in His own person, they saw that by His death He put all such things away and became the Spiritual Reality for His people. So that the church was no longer the tabernacle in the wilderness, nor the temple in Jerusalem, but a company of redeemed ones walking in spirit, in living fellowship with their exalted Head. For that is all the church is, having fellowship among itself, having fellowship in hundreds of ways, informal ways here in the earth, the fellowship of the Lord's people in fellowship with the Lord Jesus in heaven.
All types and patterns were fulfilled and then persecution had come because they had left the temple, ceased to go to the old thing, to the Jerusalem feasts and sacrifices. They had come out and were outside the camp of Judaism that was constituted according to an old pattern of things in the heavens, but not the very things themselves. Because of the suffering that was incurred, the ostracism, because of what it involved for them, and perhaps that ever recurrent insistence of the natural man which wants to see something and handle something and be in something that you can talk about here among men, they were inclining to revert to the old earthly order of things. And the apostle wrote that letter to the Hebrews and in it He speaks about their union with the Lord Jesus, and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, carrying with it the implications that they were saved from dead works.
What did he mean by dead works, for them? Not the works of the world outside of God, ignoring God. The works of Jews were in the temple, in the tabernacle. Why were these works death? Because Christ had risen. Patterns are dead when Christ rises and goes to heaven. Types are dead when Christ the Antitype is in glory. But they wanted to go back to dead works - zealous religious activity which is death!
Yes, many of us know something about the pouring out of ourselves in what we call works of God, and yet there was no Life in it, and we craved for Life. We were zealous, devoted, earnest, but it lacked something. There was some ingredient that was missing without that thing, with all the fascination, interest, gratification to our human desires to do something and to see something going, the lack of that certain ingredient made our hearts hunger and ache, and we felt, "The whole thing is empty, we will not be able to carry this on forever". Yes, dead works.
Life is in Christ, in union with Christ in heaven. Life is not any chance activity. Life is not in work for the Lord. It is in living fellowship with an exalted Head by the Holy Spirit. There must be no link with what Calvary stands against. The resurrection of the Lord Jesus represents His having gone clean through and quite out of the whole realm of death. And if we have been planted in the likeness of His resurrection, we too are regarded as having come clean out of all that - our own state by nature, our fellowship with the world, our activity in the kingdom of darkness - to be right out with the Lord Jesus by the Cross.
Life Under an Opened Heaven
That has been our theme. Under an opened heaven: a clear way from the glory into our hearts, the Lord causing His own risen Life to function in us and through us. Do you want that? Do you want an opened heaven? Do you want a heavenly life? Do you want emancipation? Do you want the universal as against the merely local? Do you want Life? Well, that is the way: by recognising all the implications of the Cross and accepting them as cutting clean in between you and all that old system of man in himself. Your natural judgments, thoughts and ideas, desires, wants, likes, preferences, your whole programme, plan, ambition, everything, cut off from all that; from the world, its spirit, its way of doing things, separated from it unto God. That is the way of Life.
But when we get out there in any measure, what a wonderful thing the Life of the Lord Jesus is! Not always are we conscious of its operation. Sometimes it is operating when we are least conscious of it. Perhaps for this impatient flesh of ours, still there in the background always trying to make contact again, the wisdom of the Lord is seen in that He does not let us know when the Life is working, that He hides from us some of His greatest activities, and when we have thought the thing has been least effective, the greatest thing has been done. But that Life is something which, when it gets in and gets active, is a greater force than all the combined forces, because it is a Life which has already triumphed over them! It is something which is greater and mightier than the whole state of man by nature. A mightier thing than human temperament, mightier than human constitution, whether Indian, or Arab, or any other.
It is a mightier thing than human nature and what we want to see is the Life of the risen Lord in the power of the Holy Spirit getting in. Not mental acceptances of truth about Jesus. Not the assent of the mind to the fact that Jesus was even the Son of God, and that He came and was born as He was, and lived the life He did, died an atoning death and rose again. These are facts which may be mentally apprehended without becoming possessed of Life.
We must be sure there is an acceptance of Christ in the heart as the Life, and then that power to live is stronger than all the 'encasing' of the old creation, it is mightier than the human nature which wraps it round; you will see things happening then. You may meet the temperament, the constitution, the make-up, but there is something there which is stronger than that, which pulls that up, checks that, rebukes that. It is a mighty something. And the world? Let persecution come, let the world with all its inimical activity and antagonism come upon that, there is something mightier than the world which believes that He has overcome the world. And satan can come out in all his evil power, but that Life which is part of and whose lot is with Christ in glory is greater than satan. This resurrection Life is a mighty thing. It can even lift a dying body and re-energise it to serve God again and again. The Life of the Risen Lord is a mighty Life. Oh, that we might know more of that Life!
We have emphasized of necessity the way of Life, the pathway of the Cross, but it is all just to arrive at the great glorious end: death is not unto death in Christ, it is unto Life. The issue is Life in His mind, and that we should, in our words in the will of God, as we walk with the Lord and live in the Spirit, convey a Life of which we are unconscious.
I had a little book given me this Easter by Miss Trotter of Algiers. There is a little fragment here, one of the choice things in it which I think just conveys what I am trying to say now. Miss Trotter, as doubtless many of you know, was up against a very deep problem with the Moslems of Algiers, North Africa. She was often discouraged, and realising the enormous character of the task of bringing souls out of the Moslem prison house of death, on one occasion wrote this:
"A bee comforted me very much this morning concerning the thing that troubles me in our work. We seem only to touch souls and leave them. He was hovering among some blackberry sprigs just touching the flowers here and there in a very tentative way, yet all unconsciously life, life, life, was left behind at every touch. It is God and His Trinity that will do the work. Yet He needs His wandering bees." [Full quote can be read by clicking here.]
That is beautiful. That wandering bee just hovering in the blackberry blooms was carrying the pollen from flower to flower, fertilizing, producing life all unconsciously, but life is life. It may be very casual apparently, a word, a meeting, a touch, but if we are living in the Spirit, something for eternity is left. Life is a marvellous thing. It is divine Life. A touch with one who is living in living fellowship with the Lord in heaven, and all unconsciously something has been done which will appear in eternity in full fruit. You do not know it. You were an unconscious wandering bee, but there it was, it happened.
But what I pray for and long for most, and for all those for whom I have any spiritual responsibility, is that apart from, above and beyond all our touching, all our words, all our messages, there shall be that which people cannot define in language, but they will have to say: "I do not understand all the meaning of the words, I do not grasp all those great ideas, but there is something that satisfies my heart." It is Life. That is what we want, and all our language will mean nothing unless there is that extra element.
You and I must ask the Lord that He will have a clear way, a clear channel through these our hearts, our lips, so consecrated, so cut off from all the realms of death, so utterly separated unto Him that He may just minister Life along what we may call the casual ways, the incidental ways, the tentative touches. And that others may become aware that although they are perhaps not any the wiser for all we have said, they have received something, and that is an undying something. And later on they will discover that while they met something that satisfied their hearts, now they are able to understand the teaching in which that came to them. The Life must be there before ever we get our teaching through. Later the understanding will come.
The New Testament was not first of all a system of doctrine; it was a Life. The doctrine came out of the Life. People later wanted to know what this Life was, and then it was explained in words. May the Lord give us this Life and people will then seek for an explanation and they will receive the doctrine.