The Measures of the Spirit

By: Jorgie Sen

The Measures of the Spirit

One the common features of our age is that there is a lot of imitation and duplication of the things of the Spirit. A constant attempt is being made to do things in a way that would appear to be spiritual and from the Spirit whereas in reality all that is done comes from the urges of the flesh and the natural man. This is one of the reasons why the Spirit is grieved and there has been much corruption and deterioration in the lives of God’s people.

It is necessary that our spiritual activities arise out of a spiritual quest. They have got to come up by reason of our seeking to know the Lord, to go on with the Lord, to reach the Lord's end, not the other way round. Quite a lot of people think if they do this and that and the other thing, that the Lord will lead them to spiritual things. Oh no, we cannot duplicate, we cannot reproduce, anything that is spiritual. No one can duplicate a spiritual assembly; the things of the Spirit cannot be reproduced. You cannot duplicate a spiritual company of the Lord's people. You cannot duplicate a real spiritual order.

There is no use announcing our intentions to set up New Testament churches, companies, and assemblies. This is something that cannot be done by man. It is impossible to duplicate anything spiritual. You get people together and say, 'We will have a New Testament church and order and this is it'; you can even have it written down - 'this is the order of a New Testament church!' Yet, the thing that may result from your deliberations and desires would be absolutely dead because one cannot reach spiritual things by merely coming out of the old order of doing spiritual things. Good intentions will not bring anyone into the new spiritual order of things. Let it be said very, very strongly, you can never guarantee that you are going to reach any fuller spiritual measure by coming out of something that has been far from the reality of spiritual wholeness. Coming out of a certain connection, a certain denomination, a certain church, a certain association, cannot by itself lead to spiritual gain, unless that thing, of course, were wrong in some quite positive sense. If one is in some personal relationship which is evil, of course one will not move spiritually until one breaks that and separates from it; but that is not what we are referring to here. There can be no assurance of spiritual progress if it is only a matter of breaking an old association or spiritual connection and being connected to something or someone else.

If we have to leave some church or some previous connection, withdraw, associate somewhere else, it has to come up as a result of our seeking the Lord and His fullness, so that we could go on with Him. The Lord will make it perfectly clear to us that that is a hindrance, a spiritual hindrance, that is definitely athwart the path of spiritual progress. It has got to be an issue like that. Let us not do anything because somebody else has told us to do so. That will never bring us into a greater spiritual ground. Coming into something new spiritually has got to come from your own longing and pursuit of the Lord and not because someone has told you to do so. It has got to arise as a practical issue as you have a quest for God's fullness. It has got to be in the living way, not the legal way, not the technical way for it is impossible to duplicate spiritual things. It cannot be done; coming into something spiritual has got to be a work of the Spirit of God.

The New Testament spiritual order is something in the hands of the Holy Spirit and He has to birth it in us. The New Testament did not come out of a study. Paul did not go and shut himself up in his study and think out the doctrines of Christianity as a theologian, look up his commentaries and authorities and so on, giving us the manual of New Testament doctrine. Paul was every day of his life right up against terrible tragedies, actual situations, and the New Testament was written right in the midst of the fight on the battlefield, grappling with problems, grappling with living problems, and when those letters were written they never thought that they were writing Holy Scripture, they never thought that in time to come people would sit down and study every word and resolve it into a doctrine, and crystallize it into "New Testament teaching." They never thought like that. What they were doing was that they were trying to meet a practical situation right on the spot, and it was wrung out of them. Yes, the Holy Spirit came through in that way and revealed the meaning of Christ in a living situation; and unless we are right in a living situation, faced with a terrible problem in our own case or someone else's, we will never be conformed to the heavenly Christ. We will never come to that by sitting down and studying New Testament doctrine. It has got to be wrought on the anvil of experience, and that experience is going to be, in a certain sense, tragic experience. It is going to be something of a real question of life and death.

Those who have really walked with God know that what they have come really to know of God, what they have come to possess of real spiritual value and strength, has come out of some dark and terribly grim and awful experience in their own life. They were taken into the depths where faith rocked. They did not know but what this was the end of everything. That is how they have grown and become spiritual and heavenly. They have not come there because the Lord has pandered to every childish demand for satisfaction and gratification and answered prayer in everything temporal. They have been tested, and if the Lord has subsequently come in to do things to answer prayer, He has only come in when He has done the spiritual thing inside and prepared and made it safe to do that. He has done it after travail. Such is the nature of this dispensation of the Spirit of God. It is heavenly, it is spiritual and God is governing the life of His true children with this fact.
This principle is made very clear in the New Testament if one has eyes to see it. Paul and the other Apostles did not leave the Temple and did not leave Jewry in order to join the Christian Church, in order even to go on with the Lord. No, no, they did not. They went to the Temple, they continued going to the Temple, they continued going to the synagogue, they continued their association with the Jews until the matter became an inward, spiritual issue, a thing from heaven, a thing by the Holy Ghost. When they were able to perceive that there was something more, something beyond and something heavenly and spiritual in their gathering together then there was a gravitation according to life and conformity to heavenly type. When they came to see that the Temple where they were meeting daily was not just a thing in Jerusalem, it was something in heaven, something that was not built by human hands then a change came upon them. Such understanding came by revelation of the Holy Ghost, not because someone told them that was so. If ever they came to withdraw from the Temple and the synagogue because they had seen the heavenly, it was a crisis in their spiritual life, a mark of their spiritual progress. It was not because it was said to them, 'You have got to leave this, come out of that, because it is all wrong!' No, it was a spiritual matter with a living issue, and one cannot find the point at which it happened with them. There is no secession recorded in the New Testament, no split as a part of the history of Christianity. It happened, and it did not happen with all the Christians at the same time, just this one and that one. It happened, that is all. In the end, they saw there was a difference between the temple in Jerusalem and the new order of the temple. It was a spiritual matter.

This is how we have to progress spiritually, not by someone telling us what to do and where to go but as a result of an inward movement of the Spirit. That is the nature of things in this spiritual order of today. It has got to be like that. If we are in something which is not on that basis, let us go back and reconsider our whole position.

Are you where you are because it has become in you at some time a spiritual issue, a matter in which your spiritual life was involved, something between you and the Lord? Is that the basis on which you are where you are? If not, let us not be afraid; God will not be grieved with us putting things on a right basis. We must be on the basis of what is living, of the Spirit, in a heavenly way, that is, on the basis of Christ in heaven known and ministered by the Holy Spirit.

The Lord considers our present lives on the basis of purely spiritual considerations. It is our spiritual growth, and through that, the spiritual growth of others that is of concern to the Lord. That is the thing that is governing the Lord in His disposing of us all the time. The natural man often looks at life situations in the light of outward things and says, “If only I were in such and such a place, in such and such a situation, had such and such a job; if only I were there or here, how much more I could be doing for the Lord, how much more I could be counting for the Lord! But where I am, I am bottled up, I am shut up, I am pressed down, and there seems so little for the Lord, so little, practically nothing, if anything at all, for the Lord. It all seems so inadequate, so insignificant, so unworthwhile, and life is passing, nothing very much to show!” We see the things seen; but what you want to see, you cannot see. That is the trouble, this matter of the things seen, even spiritual values. It is a thing we have got to settle. What is the Lord doing? Have I deliberately taken myself out of the Lord's hands, taken my own way, acted without prayer, without committing my way to the Lord, chosen my own course? Oh well then, if that is true, there may be an explanation of the situation, but if I am where I am without any self-will, where the Lord has been given first place, where I have sought to honour Him, trust Him, put my faith in Him and subject everything to Him, and yet this situation obtains, what is the explanation?

The Lord is more concerned with our spiritual and heavenly measures than He is with the number of things we are doing. We would call spiritual success the number of converts, the number of churches, the number of workers. The Lord does not. It is the spiritual measure of our lives that matters. That is what it is with the Lord. The heavenly measure, the spiritual measure, what there is of the Holy Ghost, that is the thing that matters. "Let him that glorieth, glory in this, that he hath understanding, and knoweth me" (Jeremiah 9:24).

This is a hard school, knowing the Lord, a bitter school, nevertheless, that is what the Lord is after, a spiritual, heavenly measure of Christ. He is more concerned about that than He is about anything else, and remember that you and I can never help anyone beyond our own spiritual measure. The Lord is preparing us in this hard school to do something more than the average, to be something more than the average, of spiritual value. Whether it is here or hereafter, that is not the question, but that is the end that He has in view.
The Lord disposes of us on entirely spiritual principles. He puts us into the place, the situation, the circumstances, where our spiritual life is the thing in question, our spiritual life is the matter in hand, and we shall usually find that the Lord puts us where everything is contrary to our natural disposition, because that is the difference between Christ and Adam, between the spirit and the flesh, between the new creation and the old. Am I naturally one who shrinks to take responsibility, would never take initiative myself? Well the school for me is, in the Lord's choosing, going to be one where I will have to take the initiative for my spiritual life, I have to do that from which my whole nature shrinks. If I would like to be in a corner where no demands were made on me, where I could be left alone; the Lord is not going to leave me there. Am I one who naturally would lead, would dominate, would govern, would master, would lord it? Mine is going to be the bitter school of self-emptying where I shall eventually come to a place where I am not doing anything of myself. It is a bitter school because it lets men ride over your head, it brings you into the net, and all that about you that wants to be vindicated, justified, is simply being ground to powder, being humbled in the dust. That is the school which is going to make way for the Lord Jesus.

The Spirit is making us, through our afflictions, which afflictions are things which work contrary to our natural constitution, to be conformed to Jesus in heaven and by the Spirit lead a spiritual life. May the Lord make it clear to us all and give us His grace.

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