The Root Cause of Trouble Amongst Believers

The Root Cause of Trouble Amongst Believers

Taken from Chapter 1 of The Church of theFirstborn

by T. Austin-Sparks

….We talk about our motives, and we say, Our motive was right! We talk about our conscientiousness, we talk about our intentions; but you and I do not know what lies behind what we call our good motives. There is a deceitfulness about this human heart that defies our greatest attempt at tracking it down, and we shall never do it. It takes Him that hath the seven Spirits of God, with the seven eyes, the perfect insight, to see through you and through me. We shall never see through ourselves, and you and I can never talk with any certainty about our good motives, our pure motives, our conscientiousness, because of this tangle of the old creation. This soul life of ours is such an awful mixture that you never, never know when you are on safe ground with it. It will lead you into all kinds of deceptions as to yourself, and as to others, and if you begin to live in your soul life, and assert it and develop it, you are developing what is capable of leading you into the greatest confusion and contradiction and mixture. There is an alliance with this fallen creation of forces that are not the forces of God, and you and I cannot break in between the two and sort the matter out. God Himself has not undertaken to do that. God Himself has not undertaken to disentangle this network of confusion in this old creation. God is not going to get to work like a great surgeon and drive in between this part and that part, and separate the good from the bad. He is not going to excavate and analyze and rearrange this whole tangled mass; He has not undertaken to do it. God’s whole attitude is (and this is the revelation of God’s Word) that that tangled mass is finished with, dead and buried, and God brings in something that is altogether other than that: a new creation, even Jesus Christ. There is no tangle in Him, no confusion in Him, no mixture in Him; there is perfection of harmony, a balance of order, of arrangement. All the rest is put out.

Here is where the church has become such a confused thing, and such a tragedy; for the prevailing idea is that if you give yourself over to God He will take you up and use you: "Bring over your humanity and consecrate it to the Lord! Consecrate your old man to the Lord, and go out and serve the Lord, with a consecrated old man!" it is utterly contrary to the teaching of God’s Word. The result is that in the work of God all the world over you have people serving the Lord in the energy of the flesh, in the reasoning of the flesh, in the emotions of the flesh. Meet them, counter them, frustrate them, and you meet something evil; you meet with a fight, a division, a schism, a scattering, and wholesale resignations.

Do you see what a havoc the enemy can make in that which is called the church, because people with best intentions, purest motives have come to serve the Lord with all their own intelligence, their own strength, and their own emotion? They have not seen that God has closed the door to the old creation, and that God’s attitude is this: "The only thing that can satisfy Me, that can serve Me is My Son, and if you are going to come into My service, He has to be the energy of everything, the Life of everything, the Wisdom of everything!" He has to be the governing, ruling reality in everything. It is not to be a matter of your impulses, but of His urgings and leadings by the Holy Spirit; not your sitting down to reason out what it would be good to do for the Lord, what ought to be done, what needs to be done, but what He shows you, nothing more. It is Christ who is God’s thought, and only Christ, and He is “altogether Other”.

He lived on that principle Himself, when He was here. Great appeals were made to His sympathies, but He never responded to those appeals until He had weighed the thing up before the Father and obtained the Father’s mind about it. Appeals were made to His reason, that He ought to do certain things: He ought to go up to the feast, it was the recognized thing, everybody was going up. If He was not going up He was laying Himself open to misunderstanding and misrepresentation! “Mine hour is not yet”, He said. And when they had gone up then He went up secretly. He was not playing a trick, acting a deception; He was making sure that the voice governing His movements was not the voice of popular habit, but was the voice of the Father governing Him. See how other Christ is from men, from what we are.

You and I must not bring over our old creation and give it to God, expecting God to use it. God begins with birth. The church of the firstborn is something quite new, and it comes out of a death. That death is the death of an old creation, and the resurrection is of something that is not the resuscitation of an old creation, but the resurrection of something wholly of God….

The Way of Deliverance

…. Our greatest need is to be delivered from ourselves into Christ. There we find all God’s intentions and activities concerning His Son. It is “Christ in you, the hope of glory”, that is the great secret, and there is no hope of glory anywhere else.

What does this mean? Not that I come before God saying, “I have had pure motives; I have been very honest, earnest and conscientious, and my intentions have all been of the best.” Let us stop talking nonsense. It is utter folly to talk like that. We do not know ourselves. Only God knows the truth about us, and none of that finds a place with Him or counts with Him for a moment. The point is, have I recognised that the Cross of the Lord Jesus was the smashing and ending of me, good and bad, so that I am not holding up before the Lord anything? I am as capable of the worst as any being in God’s creation is. For anybody to take the attitude that they are not capable of the worst is an attitude of the deepest deception. We do not know the power in our beings until we are put to it. If we have never committed the worst, it is because we have never been put to it in the mercy of God, but it is all there. The Lord puts His finger upon it in principle when He says, “He that hates his brother is a murderer.” It is the same spirit. You have only to extend that, provoke that anger enough, put that nature into certain circumstances, and you will discover that you are capable of things of which you would have stood in utmost horror at one time. You and I have got to come down before God and admit that we are capable of the worst, not standing on the ground of our right. The only right one is Christ from God’s standpoint. The only safe one is Christ, and therefore the only one who stands in God’s eyes is Christ, and it is as you and I, in all the brokenness, frailty, conscious weakness and humility of our own beings, by faith cling to Christ that we shall find the way out, the deliverance, the salvation. We must look behind God’s words to see bigger things than words on the surface indicate. “To this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and that trembles at My word.” That statement embodies all that we are saying.

To what one will He look? To the one who never says, "I am right!" but to the one who says, "I may be as wrong as ever man or woman was wrong, there is nothing of which I am not capable; my only ground is Christ; so help me God, Christ is my ground!" To stand on Christ is to stand always in the consciousness and recognition that this other ground, ourselves at any point, is dangerous ground. He is so Other, and there is the great divide, there is no overlapping. Between Christ and us there is a gaping chasm. God never sees that bridged, but thank God He will put Christ into us by the Holy Spirit, and while the two will ever remain apart, the old creation will go one day and that which is of Christ, as wrought into us, will abide….