Words of Wisdom and Revelation # 9

Words of Wisdom and Revelation # 9

The Real Basis of Ministry

One great danger, with which many perils are connected, is that of recognizing distinctions and differences on a basis other than a spiritual one. The whole system of Christianity has gone astray on this very point, with disastrous consequences, and there is no end to it. Even among quite spiritual and evangelical people, there is a very great deal of this Old Testament mentality, and in so far as that is true, it is loss, it is confusion - it means limitation in almost every spiritual direction.

Now, in our systematized Christianity, we have made ministers into a class; we distinguish them from the "laity" as the "clergy" - the ministry and the laity; and these are classes, official, ecclesiastical classes - an utterly false apprehension of Divine truth. Ministry  is not based upon anything of that kind at all - upon anything that is external. Ministry is based upon an inward knowledge of the Lord, and no one has a right to enter into any kind of ministry - much less take upon them the title of "minister" - except in so far as they have a personal, inward, powerful knowledge of the Lord. The other is merely formal and ecclesiastical. Ministry is not official or hierarchical, but spiritual. It is a matter of spiritual measure, and spiritual measure is just the measure of Christ within. Christ is our measure. There is no other measure with God but Christ, and we can only minister according to our inward measure of Christ.
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Truth Alive In Us

You see, we can be governed...by objective truth. It can be "the truth" - orthodox, sound, Bible truth. We can be governed by that simply because it is taught; we do it objectively. But there is something more than that. There is such a thing as the Holy Spirit taking hold of the truth of God and making it something that lives in us.

Many Christians are just Christians; that is, after they are saved, after  they are born again, their Christian life consists in doing as they are told by the minister or the Christian leader or the Bible class teacher, because it is presented to them as the thing they should do. It is what is in the Bible, and they do it so. But there is a very much higher level of life than that. The thing is right, but it is altogether transformed when the Holy Spirit brings to home to us in an inward way, and adjusts us to it. We no longer do it just because it has got to be done: we do it because the Lord has done something in us, and shown us that that is the thing He wants done.
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Giving the Word of God Its Place

A spiritual person is first of all one who seeks to know the revealed will of God in His Word. You cannot not be a spiritual person, after the kind of which we are speaking, and neglect or be careless about the Word of God. You will be one who is really diligent in reading and searching the Word of God, with one object - to know what God wants where you are concerned. If there were more of that, there would be a different kind of Christian, stronger, purer, and far more satisfying to the Lord.

The Holy Spirit knows the Bible, He knows what He has written; and if the Spirit is in us, and we are seeking to live in the Spirit, we shall live in the Word. The Word is a living thing when that is so. Spiritual people are people of the Word, and consciously or unconsciously they are checked up by it.
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Qualification for Platform Ministry

If you only take the matter of ministry itself - I mean public ministry - you find it is the most controversial point in all Christianity. More trouble has arisen over platform ministry than over anything else. But no one has a right to minister, no one has a qualification for ministry, who cannot quite easily sit back and do no ministry at all if the Lord wants it. It ought to be just as easy for a minister to take a back seat, and wait for the Lord, as it is for the natural soul to want to be on that platform.
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Believing God

It is the hardest, the most difficult thing, but there it is - the matter of believing God, not because of what He can do or will do, but because of what He is. That goes a long way, and very deep down; it tries us on everything - God's postponements, God's delays, God's seeming contradictions and paradoxes, a thousand and one things. The end is, after all, what are we going to do about it? Is God? And is God what He says He is or not? Our interpretation, our argument, our position, our mind about things - does it really set God aside? Does it? Or is our attitude that of faith? God KNOWS what He is doing.
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Spiritual Stature

Spiritual stature is determined very largely by disinterested devotion to the Lord's interests, by how little we come into the picture, and by how much we are ready to serve the Lord's ends without any gratification to ourselves, without having our hand in it.

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 10)