Boundless Heavenly Resources
For our lives and for our service - our ministry, our heavenly vocation - there are, in union with Christ, resources at our disposal which are heavenly, inexhaustible, and incorruptible. This is the great secret of strength.
It is a grand thing and a source of tremendous strength to come to the same position as that of Christ as Man, where we know that boundless heavenly resources are available. I think we only come there progressively, and not all at once. We only come there by the way of discipline - discipline which takes the form of bringing us to an utter dependence but which is yet not an emptying and a breaking down as an end in itself, but one which is accompanied by that grace of God - that graciousness of God - which, when we are empty, makes His fullness to abound.
There is a positive as well as a negative side. God is no believer in negatives as being the ultimate goal; but when He breaks and when He empties, He does something on the positive side which ever causes us to marvel, and we have to say every time: Well, that was the Lord, not ourselves. We come progressively by that way of discipline to know that there are heavenly resources which far outstrip all human possibilities, and these resources are operative.
This is what constitutes spirituality - this is what makes a life or service spiritual: it is the drawing upon heavenly resources, living the life as out from heaven. That is spirituality. That constitutes a spiritual life and a spiritual walk. The resources are not drawn from self or from the world; they are all drawn from above. The government is not that here of men or of the world, but that which is from above. Everything is so utterly from above - and so utterly not from man - that the life or work becomes spiritual as a consequence.
Some people seem to think that spirituality is a kind of mystical or mythical "something" - that spirituality is something remote from reality, a kind of frame of mind. Well, spirituality is certainly not a frame of mind in the first place. We speak of a calm and heavenly frame... and there may be something of this kind as a fruit of it... but spirituality is not a nebulous, mythical, or abstract thing. Spirituality is the most practical thing.
When men or women are called by God into some piece of Divine ministry and, in the face of the demand, are conscious to the last degree that they have no ability, no resource, no power to fulfil that ministry, that in themselves the thing is utterly impossible, that for them to essay to do it would be the utmost folly and absurdity - when in such circumstances they recognize that they have a living Christ in whom are resources more than enough to meet that demand... and by faith lay hold of Him and go forward into the ministry with that consciousness... that is spirituality; and that is practical, tremendously practical. The issues prove that it is practical. It is in that way heavenly things are done.
Christ's spirituality was not that He was remote from what was practical in everyday life. It was that He was bringing heavenly forces and resources to bear upon the practical matters of everyday life. You can wash doors, or clothes, or floors - or do any of these ordinary domestic things - in spirituality. People seem to think that spiritual work and ordinary work - household work, for example - are two different things. They talk about the spiritual work and the other work. Now, you can bring heavenly resources in to do anything that is legitimate, and the doing of those things may be a testimony.
The majority of people have no occasion to draw upon heavenly resources for a platform ministry. For the most part their work is of some regular, daily kind; and very often they feel utterly unable for it, and they are tempted to think that if they had some spiritual ministry to fulfill - if they had to go and take a meeting or speak to some souls about spiritual matters - they could make a claim upon the Lord for help and He would carry them through. For the trivial round and common task such a thought is all too often wholly absent from the mind. Now, exactly the same resources have to come into the ordinary work as into what we call spiritual work. It has all to be done on a spiritual basis and therefore to be a testimony. To get through an ordinary day's work often requires something more than ordinary human resources. Spirituality consists in our doing everything as out from heaven. Let us be careful how we draw a line, lest we make a distinction between the spiritual and "the rest."
There is a great deal of strength to be drawn from the realization that things are not incidental, not general, but specific with regard to our being here on this earth - that we are related to an eternal purpose - that we are called according to His purpose. Wherever we are... provided we are there after having subjected our lives utterly to the Lord and definitely sought to be in His will... we are not to mark time - not to stand and wait - but to recollect that we are there in relation to a purpose.
A great many of the Lord's people are standing about waiting - marking time. They think that they are in a kind of hiatus - in some place where the real thing has no bearing upon their lives. Now let us leave such thoughts behind us. There is a treachery about that mentality. It may be true that we have not yet come into our ultimate calling, but we are in it relatively now, and we shall never come into that unless we are making good all the possibilities that are present where we are.
This is preparatory. If the Lord were to come to us and say: Now look here, this present time which seems to be unmarked by anything very special in the character of the work is nevertheless intended by Me to fit you for a large work that I have in store, which will develop in a certain given year; and on the first day of that year you will move out into a tremendous piece of work! we should begin at once to use the time between for preparation. But God does not do that, and yet it may all the time be true that at a given point in the Divine ordering of our lives there should be a moving into something very important. But He would not have us to be exercised toward Himself simply because of a piece of work that lies ahead; He would have us to be exercised toward Himself for His own sake.
It is so easy to get people to be very earnest when you give them definite work to do; but so often, apart from that, there is no personal spiritual initiative in them which takes this attitude: Well, it may be that God has something on hand! I do not know, but I am going to use this time for Him so that I shall be ready if He should call. If we were but to take that attitude - to recognize that in any case we are bound up with the purpose of God - and if only we applied ourselves with all our hearts, we should find that that purpose was already present! There is something relative to our present position which is tremendously related to God's purpose; and were we to take that line - that attitude - we should derive strength from that definiteness of objective.
