Mutual Refreshing
By Watchman Nee
In John's Gospel there is recorded an event which only he has preserved for us. It is an event full of divine meaning and one which greatly helps to illumine for us this problem of living in the world. I refer to the incident in Chapter 13 in which our Lord Jesus girds himself with a towel, and taking a basin, washes his disciples' feet. This action of Jesus has lessons to teach us which I do not propose to go into fully here. Instead I want us to look in particular at his command which follows it. "Ye also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should also do as I have done to you.... If ye know these things, blessed are ye if ye do them" (verses 14-17). What is this mutual feet washing? What does it mean that I should wash my brother's feet and that my feet should be washed by my brother?
The aspect of truth specially emphasized here is refreshment. As we shall shortly see, it is something very dear to the Lord that we as his children should learn to minister refreshment to our brethren, and that they in turn should be a means of refreshment to our spirits.
Let me say at once that this passage does not concern sins. Whether I go barefoot or wearing sandals, or even shoes, the dust that gathers on my feet is something inevitable. I cannot avoid it. But for me to have a fall, and having fallen to roll in the dust so that it collects on my body and on my clothes-that is not inevitable; it is altogether wrong! I have to walk from one place to another, but it is quite unnecessary for me to roll along the street in order to get there. I can do so without floundering in the mud!
Equally in the Christian life, to stumble and fall and then to flounder in the dust is sin, certainly. It calls for repentance and it needs God's forgiveness. For it is not necessary for me to walk with the Lord like that, hiding behind the excuse that "I must fall once in a while; it is inevitable!" That, we all agree, is wrong.
But the point about the dust on our feet is this, that in walking through the world, no matter who we are or how careful we may be, it is inevitable table that our feet will collect something. Of course if we do not touch the earth at all, we certainly pick up nothing, but to achieve this we should have to be carried around. If we do touch the ground-and who seriously expects not to?-we are certain to pick up what is there. Even our Lord Jesus rebuked his host with the words: "Thou gayest me no water for my feet" (Luke 7:44). So please remember that the mutual washing in John 13 is not concerned with sins committed, for which there is always forgiveness through the Blood, but from which anyway God intends that we should be delivered. No, it is concerned rather with our daily walk through the world, during which it is unavoidable that we shall contract something. "Ye are clean," Jesus says. The precious Blood sees to that. "He that is bathed needeth not ..." and as far as sin is concerned the sentence might end there. But move about in Satan's kingdom and something certainly clings to us. Like a film upon us it comes between us and our Lord. This is inescapable, simply because we are touching the world's things all the time, its business and its pleasures, its corrupt scale of values and its whole ungodly outlook. Hence the words with which Jesus concludes: "... save to wash his feet."
So let us come now to the practical outworking of this. Some of you brothers and sisters in Christ have to go out to work in offices or shops for, say, seven or eight hours a day. It is not wrong that you do so. It is not sin to work in a shop or a factory. But when you come home from your place of employment, do you not find yourself tired and dispirited and out of tune with things? You meet a brother, but you cannot slip easily and directly into speaking with him of divine things. It is as though there were a coating of something contaminating you. I repeat: that is not necessarily sin at all; it is just that your contact with the world has deposited upon you that film of tarnish. You cannot help feeling it, for there seems to be an inability to rise up to the Lord at once. The luminous touch which you had with him in the morning seems to-have been darkened; its freshness has gone from you. We all know that experience.
