Tuesday, May 19, 2015

The Stewardship of the Mystery # 81

The Corporate Expression of the Heavenly Man (continued)

One Life In Christ

Firstly, this involves the one life that by the Holy Spirit is in all the members of Christ. "There is ... one Spirit"; "Giving diligence to keep the unity of the Spirit ..." There is the one life by the Holy Spirit. Only thus does Christ come to His fullness in His Body, does the Church fulfill the Divine thought for its existence, come to the Divine end.

We have already sought to see how the Heavenly Man in person was in every detail governed by the Spirit, inasmuch as upon such a government depended the fulfillment of the whole revelation of God concerning Him. All the Scriptures which had gone before pointed to Him, and waited for their fulfillment in Him, and He was to be the fulfillment of all those Scriptures to a detail. It would have been an impossible, overwhelming, crushing responsibility to have taken that on mentally, to have felt a consciousness every instant of His life that He was responsible for everything that was written in the Scriptures. To have had that on His mind would have been an intolerable burden impossible of bearing. He would have been the most introspective person that had ever lived. Every moment He would have been asking: Am I doing the right thing? Am I doing it in the right way? Am I doing what I ought to be doing according to that Book, that standard? But His life, begin governed by the anointing, being under the control of the Spirit, meant that He spontaneously, and by the inward consciousness that was His through the Holy Spirit as to what was, and what was not, the mind of God, did fulfill the whole revelation.

Now what was true of Him personally has to be true of Him in the corporate sense. Here is a revelation concerning Jesus Christ which has come out of the eternal counsels of God, a revelation of vast meaning, a destiny, a great spiritual, heavenly system summed up in Him, and which is to be expresses, to be wrought out, to be realized in Him corporately as in Him personally. But how is it possible for us to fulfill it, to realize it, to attain unto it; for it to have its fulfillment and its expression in us? Only on the basis of the one life by Holy Spirit in all. That is what gives force to the exhortation in this very letter to "...be filled with the Spirit." That gives the real meaning and value to the whole teaching concerning the Holy Spirit - the receiving of the Spirit, walking in the Spirit, being led by the Spirit - because only so can that which has been produced by the mind of God, concerning His Son, and which is to have its full realization in the Body of Christ, be reached. How necessary, then, for us all to live in the Spirit. It is not enough that some of us should live in the Spirit; it is important that all should do so, and that none should walk after the flesh.

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 82 - (An Inter-related and Inter-dependent Life)

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