We come now to look at the provision that God has made to meet the problem created by the soul life of man.
After the Lord’s baptism, and before His public ministry began, Satan came and tempted Him. Satan tempted Jesus to satisfy His essential needs by turning stones to bread; to secure immediate respect for His ministry by appearing miraculously in the temple court, to assume without delay the world dominion destined for Him. Why did Satan tempt Jesus to do such strange things? He could have tempted Him to sin in a more thoroughgoing way. But Satan did not do that; he knew better. He only said to Jesus, “If thou art the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.” What did it mean? The implication was this: “If You are the Son of God You must do something to prove it. Here is a challenge. Some will certainly raise a question as to whether Your claim is real or not. Why do You not settle the matter finally now by coming out and proving it?”
Being a perfect Man, our Lord had a soul and a body, just like us, and it was possible for Him to act from the soul – that is, from Himself. The whole subtle object of Satan was to get the Lord to act for Himself – that is, from the soul – and, by the stand He took, Jesus absolutely repudiated each action. In Adam, man had acted from himself apart from God; that was the whole tragedy of the garden. Now in a similar situation, the Son of man takes another ground. “The Son can do nothing of Himself” (John 5:19). That total denial of the supremacy of the soul life was to govern all His ministry.
Jesus made this very clear to His disciples when He left them. He had died and was risen, and now He told them to wait in Jerusalem for power to come upon them. What is this power of the Holy Spirit, this power from on high of which He spoke? It is nothing less than the virtue of His death, resurrection, and ascension. The Holy Spirit is the Vessel in whom all the values of the death, resurrection, and exaltation of the Lord are deposited, that they may be brought to us. He is the one who contains those values and mediates them to men. That is why the Spirit could not be given until Jesus had been glorified. Then only could He rest upon men and women that they might witness; for without the values of the death and resurrection of Christ, all such witness is empty.
Our old man has been forever crucified; it is something done, to be apprehended by divine revelation and then accepted by an act of simple faith. But there is a further aspect of the Cross, that implies in the expression “bearing His Cross daily”. The Cross has borne me; now I must bear it; and this bearing of the Cross is an inward thing. It is a continuous process, a step-by-step following after Him. We do not lose our souls for to do so would be to lose our individual existence completely. The soul is still there with its natural endowments, but the Cross is brought to bear upon it to bring those natural endowments into death – to put the mark of His death upon them – and thereafter as God may please, to give them back to us in glorious resurrection.
It is in this sense that Paul, writing to the Philippians, expresses the desire “that I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, becoming confirmed unto His death” (Philippians 3:10).
“This mark of death is upon the soul all the time, to bring it to the place where it is always subordinate to the Spirit and never independently asserts itself. Only the Cross, working in such a way, could make a man of the caliber of Paul, and with the natural resources hinted at in Philippians 3, so distrust his own natural strength that he could write to the Corinthians, “I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power – that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 2:2-3).
Where is my heart? The Cross has to work in us a true detachment in Spirit from anything and anyone outside of the Lord Himself. But we are as yet only dealing with the more outward aspects of the soul’s activity. The soul giving reign to its affections, the soul asserting itself and trying to manipulate things, the soul becoming preoccupied with things on the earth – these are still small things, and do not yet touch the real heart of the matter. There is something deeper yet.
Jesus passed into death and His life emerged in many lives. The Son died, and came forth as the first of many sons. He let go His life that we might receive it. It is in this aspect of His death that we are called to die. It is here that He makes clear the value of conformity to His death, whereby we lose our own natural life in order that, in the power of His resurrection, we may become life imparters, sharing with others the new life of God who is in us. This is the secret of ministry, the path of real fruitfulness to God. As Paul says, “For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So then death is working in us, but life in you.” (2 Corinthians 4:11-12).
We are coming to our point. In us who have received Christ, there is a new life. We all have that precious possession, the treasure in the vessel. Praise the Lord for the reality of His life within! But why is there so little expression of that life? Why is there an abiding alone? Why is it not overflowing and imparting life to others? Why is it scarcely making itself apparent even in our own lives? The reason why there is so little sign of life where life is present is that the soul in us is enveloping and confining that life so that it cannot find outlet. We are living in the soul; we are working and serving in our own natural strength; we are not drawing from God. It is the soul that stands in the way of the springing up of life. Lose it – for in that way lies fullness.
How do I recognize that God is dealing with me in this way? God must bring us to a point – I cannot tell you how it will be, but He will do it – where, through a deep and dark experience, one natural power is touched and fundamentally weakened, so that we no longer dare trust ourselves. He has had to deal with some of us very strangely, and taken us through difficult and painful ways, in order to get us there. At length there comes a time when we no longer like to do Christian work – indeed we almost dread to do things in the Lord’s Name. But then at last it is that He can begin to use us.
God is bringing you to the place where He has but to express a wish and you respond instantly. That is the Spirit of the servant (Psalm 40:7-8), but such a spirit does not come naturally to any of us. It comes only when our soul, the seat of our natural energy and will and affections, has been brought, by the touch of the Cross, under His sway. Yet such a servant spirit is what He seeks, and will have in us all. The way to it may be long drawn, or it may be just one stroke; but God has His ways and we must have regard for them.
Every true servant of God must know at some time that disabling from which he can never recover; he can never be quite the same again. There must be that established in you which means that from henceforth you will really fear yourself. You will fear to move out of the impulse of your soul, for you know what a bad time you will have in your own heart before the Lord if you do. You have known something of the chastening hand of a loving God upon you, a God who deals with you as with sons (Hebrews 12:7). The Spirit Himself bears witness in your spirit to that relationship, and to the inheritance and glory that are ours if so be that we suffer with Him (Romans 8:16-17); and your response to the Father of our spirit is, “Abba, Father.”
But when this is really established in you, you have come to a new place of resurrection ground. Death, in principle, may have had to be wrought out to a crisis in your natural life, but when it has, then you find God releases you into resurrection. You discover that what you have lost is being given back, though not quite as before. The principle of life is at work in you now, something that directs and empowers you, animating you with fresh divine life. From henceforth what you have lost will be brought back, but touched now with new values because it is under heaven’s control.
When we come to live our life in the Spirit and by the Spirit, though we still use our soul faculties just as we do our physical faculties, they are now the servants of the Spirit; and when we have reached that point God can really use us.
The temptation is always to try to help God by taking things back ourselves; but remember, there must be a full night in the sanctuary – a full night in darkness. It cannot be hurried; He knows what He is doing. We would like to have death and resurrection put together within one hour of each other. We cannot face the thought that God will keep us aside for so long a time; we cannot bear to wait, however there will be a definite period when He will keep us there. Afterwards we will find that everything is given back to us in glorious resurrection; and nothing can measure the difference between what was before and what now is!
It is a blessed thing when you know the Lord has met you and touched you in that fundamental way, and that disabling touch has been received. The Lord knows what He is doing with His own, and He has left no aspect of our need unmet in His Cross, that the glory of the Son may be manifested in the sons. Only then can we say with Paul, “we worship by the Spirit of God, and glory in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh” (Philippians 3:3).
May God make each one of us, as truly as Paul was, a bondservant of Jesus Christ.